You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

But not to my mother. I’d grown used to maneuvering within the lanes of her behaviors, looking to them as guidance, her innate instincts precluding me from finding my own.

“We wear masks to protect ourselves, but they also keep us from being vulnerable,” Richard announced the first week. “They keep us from achieving intimacy.” During the Wednesday night Big Book meeting, a recovering alcoholic defined intimacy as “into-me-you-see.” I’d written it down on the back page of my journal.

Above all, I longed for the smell of the jasmine flowers that were outside every apartment building, though curiously I hardly noticed them while I was there. It seemed I could only ever smell them from thousands of miles away.

I needed help, I thought to myself, and then remembered that I was getting help. But it just didn’t feel like I was getting any better. I thought of that slogan: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I never confessed; I just hoped the feelings would go away. But instead they spread like a disease, rushing through my veins and lining my stomach until I felt nauseated. I then stopped and stood still as another slogan seeped into my head: Secrets keep us sick.