You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

It occurred to me then that I wasn’t a flat-chested kid anymore, that curves had begun to appear along the length of me. I was no longer indistinguishable from a boy child.

My mother had, and still has, a native’s knowledge. She knows the rules instinctively, in that part of the world, and I only ever learn them by accident.

In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.

Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space.

Only now, years later, do I think I understand. It was in that moment that she first realized: I wasn’t like her. The trousers were a demarcation line, one that separated me from my mother and her lineage.

Look at me, I wanted to say to her then. Please don’t look away.

Hours later I was staring at newborn Karim through the glass partition, thinking him superfluous and knowing things would now be different, my mother no longer mine entirely.

“Your worries are like water,” she often said. “The moment one flows out, another floods in to fill the space.”

“I want you to really sift through your issues and face them, and feel a fraction of the torture I feel as a result of this.”

“Maybe one day you’ll learn you can’t treat people with such disregard. Even yourself.”

I needed her to care. Worse than anger was indifference: her approval was my compass, even when that meant resisting it.

We watched at a cool remove while enjoying the comforts of our American suburb, seemingly untouched, oblivious of the underlying trauma.

“Love addicts have an uncontrollable appetite for the object of their affection.”

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Being regularly excluded, I developed a preference for solitude, one that I wasn’t so ready to exchange for the incessant company of complete strangers.

I was loved from a distance, the safest way to be loved.

While love addicts turn to a person as a drug of choice for soothing the pain of their difficult relationships with themselves, the absence of healthy self-love is itself codependency.

“Here we like to think of it as the pain from childhood that manifests in adulthood.”

But the things that we craved most, like fatherly guidance or affection, he would not, could not, provide.

When guilt morphed into resentment and grew so big that I was blinded by it, it seeped out of my pores and left me feeling powerless. And

I liked the power of it, of exciting someone with my voice.

I came to worship them, these older men. I craved the wisdom and guidance they willingly offered and that my father withheld. I adored how sexy they made me feel, likely because of the discrepancy between our levels of attractiveness.

Getting me to stop smiling was a goal for all the counselors. According to them it was part of my armor.

“We wear masks to protect ourselves, but they also keep us from being vulnerable,”

loved. By the time I was in high school, our trips to Jordan had changed shape, contoured by summer jobs.

For years I would freeload off of my mother’s entitled adoration, reaping its benefits. I didn’t have to do a thing to be loved, I just had to be.

My conversation was awkward, my gestures uncertain—a handshake or air kisses, and if the latter, two kisses or three? As an adult, my presence was off-putting.

“When you told me you were beautiful and I was average, I felt bad, because that’s true, and I can’t believe you would actually say it to me.”

My chest was heaving up and down, little bubbles rising like in water about to boil, rushing to the sur...

“Tell her, ‘that’s not true.’ Tell her!” she snapped. “No.” “Say it!”

Other Arab women have been mutilated by knives, shrapnel, acid, bombs, and I was shaken because my mother told me I was average? Is narcissism an inherited trait?

But that was precisely my issue: wanting to try everything, and everyone. “I guess I don’t,” I said.

“Do you know what the definition of insanity is?” I mumbled, “It’s doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

I became enamored with the place, thinking that by experiencing it for myself and taking over a space that seemed to belong to her, I could conquer the pain and eliminate her from my memory.

I felt intoxicated by my levity. For the first time in years, I was bound to no one.

“You’ll find that having someone who has a claim on you, and who you can claim, it’s one of the greater things in life.”

When she fell asleep I burrowed my nose in her blond hair, closed my eyes, and inhaled deeply. I had never been more sure.

The question crushed me in its honesty. Until then, I didn’t know. I thought that the intensity of sex was correlated with love. That passion was specific and that adultery meant something was wrong.

I’d been clinging to her I-love-yous like a refugee clings to a threatened nationality. They were the homeland that validated my existence.

I’m tired of elephant shoe. I love you.

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.

“Desire in our age is simultaneously sinful and boring, because it desires what belongs to the neighbor.”

“Read all you want,” she said with uncharacteristic authority. “But you’ll just end up a more informed prisoner.”

Instead, the only places I traveled existed along the length of Kate, beneath her clothes, inside her mouth, all on her white-sheeted bed that felt like a frothy ocean. An art and fashion major, she painted, drew, collaged, and dressed me.

She drank and tasted me. She did everything but feed me, though not for lack of trying. I had lost control over my own volition, or maybe I’d chosen to wrap it up in her.

I winced with fear and a fleeting disgust. A relationship with a woman meant failure: I had failed to get a man, failed to find something normal, failed to not be pathetic.

I sniffled and snorted and tried to suck back snot and tears, which only made me cry harder. I’m aware I can be exhausting—“you exist too much,” my mother often told me.

The sky in Giza that morning was untainted; an interrupted expanse of blue.

The fact that I grew up outside the Middle East doesn’t make me feel less Arab. I speak the language, albeit cautiously and brokenly, often failing to get the correct pronunciation and inflection.

Back then, to be different was simply a bad thing; diversity wasn’t yet something to celebrated, and being white was necessary if not sufficient for coolness.