You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

communicated something to my mother as I stood there smiling in a pair of men’s pants, a message I didn’t know I was sending her. She has always known first what I have yet to discover, has always seen it before I could.

I was used to feeling envy when it came to pregnancy.

“I’m devastated that you could be so careless with my heart,” she wrote, and I shuddered. It was exactly how I felt my own heart had been treated throughout my life—carelessly, callously. “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.”

learn you can’t treat people with such disregard. Even yourself.”

“Good luck finding someone to love you like I did.”

The notion that everyone will eventually cease to exist brings me great comfort and temporary courage.

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.

Some of my strongest memories of my father involve him weeding the garden or watching television.

Yet this is the realm, the realm of my mother, in which I consistently forget how to survive.

As an adult, my presence was off-putting.

living with my mother, money saved at a price much greater than rent.

I thought that the intensity of sex was correlated with love. That passion was specific and that adultery meant something was wrong.

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

And if anyone knew, if even Kate acknowledged our relationship, it might end. The less visible I was to her, the thinner I got and the less space I took up in her life, the more likely things were to continue.

I remember how we slept. I’d lie flat on my back and Kate would unzip my hoodie halfway down my chest, slide her hand onto my breast, and place her head on my clavicle. I’d burrow my nose into her hair. When she wanted sex she would gently caress my nipple; it would harden and she’d run her pierced tongue down my stomach, arriving underneath a pair of tattered boxers that I wore as pajamas. I’d pull her on top of me, aligning our bodies so that we practically snapped into place. I always came with such force that my back would shoot upward, propelling me forward and crashing into her. “I

Her apology came more directly. “I’m sorry I ruined your life,” she said before leaving, her condescension excused only when imagining the guilt that must’ve spawned it.

Baggage. No one ever breaks free from it. Everyone has to figure out how to go on living, to be decent, in spite of it.

But inevitably, the hurt would fade too quickly, and two hours later we’d be having lunch.

how dare I not give in to whatever she wanted, the moment she wanted it, and have a life of my own that didn’t directly involve serving her?

A few nights later, we sleep together for the last time. “I’m going to go down on you until you come,” I tell her. I want nothing in return. Besides, she has nothing to give me, not even acknowledgment that any of this is happening.

There is still a lingering hope, the possibility of something good, maybe even great. But I can no longer afford the cost of finding out.

“Good to know we like the same foods,” she says. “That bodes well for us.” She laughs, and I laugh too. I like that she’s assessing this openly, as though we are two members of a committee evaluating the potential for our relationship from a detached vantage point. I nod in agreement.

Sometimes she’s like a squirrel with a nut, she tells me, other times she watches porn and masturbates all day. I blush at the word masturbate, our first overt reference to anything sexual. “I’m like that too,” I tell her. “Always at the extremes.”

Our mutual sacrifice creates wounds that may never heal. I will carry sadness for her pain, and also for mine. In receiving love from others, it will always be hers I crave most.