You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

Somehow, I had stopped noticing my body long enough for it to change.

In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.

girls. I felt, for once, seen.

It was in that moment that she first realized: I wasn’t like her.

She has always known first what I have yet to discover, has always seen it before I could. Look at me, I wanted to say to her then. Please don’t look away.

But it sometimes seemed like she still couldn’t see through me, still chose to believe in a version of who I was that we both knew no longer existed.

I had a brief image of it derailing. Wouldn’t that make things easier?

At the time I thought the same thing: she should’ve had better. She didn’t deserve this at all.

I wanted her, I wanted her life, I wanted to live inside her life while still living inside my own. I wanted, above all, for her to like me.

Anything beautiful that’s mine was once hers.

It was shameful to expect her to care about me enough to condescend.

That way I could at least transfer my pain onto something that made sense, something real.

I hope you’ve learned by now that those people aren’t real? And that they’ll never love you back?”

Finally, Anna had mustered the resistance I’d been craving. It was at once frightening and attractive: never had I wanted her more.

Without the security of a relationship, longing felt less safe. It felt lonely.

“I don’t care what you choose to do anymore,” she said, and I crumbled. I needed her to care.

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

Soon I was stick-thin, almost back to my pre-recovery weight, which provided a comfort akin to an old friend and a semblance of control.

Besides, I didn’t need a partner to feel loved: I was a DJ! I was loved from a distance, the safest way to be loved.

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.

evidence for what he already believed. “You don’t see yourself,” he’d say, sneering in my direction before turning back to the TV. “You don’t see the way you act. You’re just like her.”

To be a woman who desired other women seemed even worse, especially shameful and shocking in its lack of reverence for the male-centric culture.

“When you tell me I don’t deserve to be loved,” I winced in embarrassment, “I feel sad?”

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?

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.

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 mistook the pain of losing control for love and compassion.

I too had always felt repulsed whenever anyone tried to get close to me. But who was it I actually loathed? Who was I really judging?

understood. I had come from my mother, I had lived inside her, but I was not of her. I was not an Abu Sa’ab, a wedge driven even deeper after she divorced my father and 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.

How many stories have been penned for unrequited love? How many must I write to earn my existence? There’s more to you than these obsessions.