You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

double standard, a shame I had simply accepted until then. In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.

“We’re not in Saudi Arabia,” Anna would say whenever I drew back if she tried to take my hand in public. “No one here cares.”

Is this girl dumb

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

I wanted to take back every vulnerability I’d ever shown her, every moment that I had asked for comfort.

At the time I didn’t realize what it was that separated the two sides of my family: that my paternal cousins did not live in the noisy neighborhood, go to the community pool, and wait to eat hummus sandwiches at home by choice.

Her instincts were screaming at her to get out of the marriage and the meth, but she couldn’t bear to leave him. The thought of disappointing him was just too much.

“It’s how I was raised,” she told me. “To please others. You know?”

when Greg walked into the living room carrying Why Men Love Bitches, a contraband item, as we were only supposed to be reading self-help literature that Nancy had sanctioned.

I stared at the clock as the minute hand eclipsed the hour hand for the third time and decided that only a white man would feel comfortable taking up so much space.

TRULY

If my mother was Hamas—unpredictable, impulsive, and frustrated at being stifled—my father was Israel. He’d refuse to meet her most basic needs until she exploded. Then he would point at her and cry, “Look at what a monster she is, what a terror!” But never once did he consider why she had resorted to such extreme tactics, or his role in the matter.

I would sit on my windowsill with the phone pressed to my ear, my mother and father screaming at each other down the hall just as Andy or Joe or Matt would moan into the receiver, drowning out my parents.

By the time I was in high school, I decided I liked older men. They felt safe to me, and oddly familiar. And they seemed to appreciate me so much more than the guys in my class,

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

Before each meeting I would plan what issues I’d present and what references I’d casually toss into our conversation, ones specifically designed to impress her based on information I’d gleaned from her semi-public Myspace page.

’48ers rather than ’67 Palestinians, their fate was to be exiled to camps in Lebanon rather than live under occupation—

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.

dropped her married name entirely. After that I was a foreigner, an unfamiliar thing, other. I would never belong to her again, though I desperately wanted to. No matter how hard I tried I would never attain the status of being hers. It would always remain just beyond my reach.

“I wish you knew how much I love you,” he says to me. “Of course you love me,” I snap back, if only to keep my ego intact. “I have no doubt that you love me.” I begin to laugh crazily. “I gave you the most authentic parts of me,” I tell him.

OF COURSE YOU LOVE ME

At least this is what I want to believe, that I’ve practiced healthy intimacy with him, despite how much I’ve actually withheld. I want to him to think that I allowed him every point of access, every vulnerability, and that he’d allowed me his, too, that we had guns to each other’s head and he just happened to shoot first. “You don’t get to love me anymore.” I push past him and walk home, alone as ever.

“Have you heard from him?” I ask, and immediately regret it. “Not a word,” Claire says. “You?” I hesitate. When you don’t want to lose someone, it’s so tempting to deceive them.

How many must I write to earn my existence?

Until now, it’s never occurred to me that my mother was—my mother is—a child, forever stunted by her own traumas. I reconsider everything that was inflicted upon her. That she grew up under