You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

It occurred to me in that moment to question why, as a man, his bare legs were somehow less troubling than mine. It was a double standard, a shame I had simply accepted until then. In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.

Maybe I could love her from a distance and keep myself intact. Maybe I needed to protect myself against debilitating and devastating heartbreak. Maybe I thought that was possible.

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

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

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

Frightened by healthy intimacy, they devote an obsessive amount of time, attention, and value to someone who cannot or will not love them back.”

For the majority of my childhood, I only ever understood a third of what anyone was saying.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“He’s just always blaming her for everything, punishing her for having needs,” I said to Richard. Greg looked up as though he was going to defend himself, but then stayed quiet. “Making her out to be some kind of monster.”

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. Why would you want to exclude men, the stronger, better gender, from the equation?

Worse than receiving rage was the ability to detect its remnants.

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?

It usually started with the hollows of a particular collarbone—the professor’s, the nutritionist’s, the editorial assistant’s, anyone’s other than my actual partner’s—growing into a full-fledged obsession with whomever they belonged to. In an attempt to escape my thoughts, I’d solicit and seduce others to the point of mental annihilation, only to wake up the next morning with my obsession fortified. Alcohol made it worse. So did drugs. Exercise, especially when combined with a playlist, was nearly lethal. And the factors that elevated the behavior from “bad crush” to addiction were time and intensity, as well as the compulsive behavior that accompanied it; namely, fucking to forget.

“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.”

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 couldn’t help myself. But it wasn’t safe to tell her what was wrong, and she never insisted on knowing.

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.

As love addicts begin to develop a relationship with the object of their affection, she wrote, they stop seeing who that person actually is, but instead focus on a fantasy image, which they place like a beautiful mask over the head of the real human being.

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

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.

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.

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

Maybe starving myself was an act of passive resistance, a way of regaining the control I had surrendered to her and refused to take back, which would’ve been the healthier option. Instead, I chose to leverage her guilt.

I’m aware I can be exhausting—“you exist too much,” my mother often told me.

I’m troubled by the number of people who lump all Arabs and Muslims into one large, threatening category, support U.S. intervention in the region under the guise of “spreading democracy,” without any contextual understanding of the situation on the ground, and vote for xenophobic, uninformed candidates who also have limited knowledge of the region. My expectation is in some ways hypocritical, as I myself have displayed a great lack of political and cultural knowledge in the Middle East.

Yet it’s the idiosyncrasies of culture that keep me an outsider, and leave me with a persistent and pervasive sense of otherness, of non-belonging. Basic but nuanced knowledge; the stuff that no one really teaches you.

Even though America is built upon the idea of assimilation, a so-called melting pot, we Arabs stand out.

It is a bizarre and unsettling feeling, to exist in a liminal state between two realms, unable to attain full access to one or the other.

I was terrified at the thought of not having her, and I mistook the pain of losing control for love and compassion.

“You have taken my weaknesses, insecurities, and confessions and used them all against me.”

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.

“Before tonight I was attracted to you,” he writes, “but in a speculative, abstract way. After we kissed, though, I walked home with my muscles in tension, imagining the unpublishable things I want to do to you.”

We may never do anything but talk, and so what: some friendships are driven by attraction. The only certainty is that there’s too much complicity between us to hurt each other, no?”

know that I need this from him—love—but I also need it to be real this time, and not an outcome of passion, or jealousy, or control. I need it to just be.

I had never been able to escape the hollowness. Always, in the moments immediately after coming, I felt a sharp and excruciating emptiness. Within moments it was gone, but for those first few seconds, as my muscles relaxed and my breathing slowed, I would experience a despair that I’d come to dread.

Appetite is embarrassing enough; visibly trying to satiate it, utterly mortifying.

Our mutual sacrifice creates wounds that may never heal.