An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

I am my family’s appendix, its unnecessary appendage.

Of all the delicious pleasures my body has begun to refuse me, sleep is the most precious, the sacred gift I miss the most. Restful sleep left me its soot. I sleep in fragments, if at all. When I was planning for my later years, I did not expect to spend every night in my darkened bedroom, lids half open, propped up on unfluffable pillows, holding audience with my memories.

When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved.

If I tell the truth—and I should, shouldn’t I?—I translate books with my invented system because it makes time flow more gently. That’s the primary reason, I think. As Camus said in The Fall: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,” wrote Keats. No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed.

Unlike the main streets that cut the city with a butcher’s cleaver, this ancient one wiggles its hips quite a bit. It negotiates with the neighborhood, it haggles, gives and takes; rarely is it straight, it is intrinsic.

I am inoffensiveness incarnate. I don’t expect people to love me, like me, or feel anything at all toward me. I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies. I’m not suggesting that I’m congenitally shy, or that I’m a wallflower whose deepest desire is to bloom into a scandalously fragrant tiger lily, just that I try to live without interfering in the lives of others because I have no wish for them to interfere in mine.