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.

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

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.

Nationality is partly a matter of convenience.

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

My resistance to groups is likely a response to my culture’s fervent embrace of them, which locates value not as much in the individual as in the cohort they belong to. “

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.

the pain from childhood that manifests in adulthood.”

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.

I felt surface-level excitement at the fantasy of being with a man and feeling emotionally fulfilled by one, rather than just sexually satisfied, along with underlying despair, knowing it was precisely that: a fantasy.

Erratic, unpredictable cruelty usually coincides with the most vulnerable and tender moments.

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

feeling a pinch of guilt for being in Italy and not the West Bank, volunteering with refugees or resisting the occupation, or at least something related to my heritage.

“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.”

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’d long for nights on Teta’s veranda, watching her lay out Arabic newspapers and roll grape leaves, the combination of watermelon and halloumi cheese, fried falafel balls poking out of oil-soaked paper bags, roadside fruit tents with peaches spilling off the display and onto the earth, the sound of the three-stringed oud coming from the wedding at the nearby hotel, the sight of the green-lit minarets and the muezzin’s lyric voice calling everyone to prayer. 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.”

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

And yet, in the U.S. I’m just as much of an outsider. Even though America is built upon the idea of assimilation, a so-called melting pot, we Arabs stand out.

At the time, they found it funny and harmless to tease me about my otherness; they’d even call me “the terrorist,” which I laughed along with, not fully processing nor having the courage to resist the insidious danger of such “jokes,” ones that just a few years later would be deemed microaggressions or else blatant hate speech. Back then, to be different was simply a bad thing; diversity wasn’t yet something to celebrated,

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.

Anouk and I joke that my heart is a fleshy, blubbery, trembling whale of a heart, one that lies bleeding on an unidentified beach somewhere. Hers is guarded, hidden inside a cage, at the bottom of a well, tucked away.

How many stories have been penned for unrequited love? How many must I write to earn my existence?

I lament the disappointments that have come from surrendering her approval to pursue my own desires. I lament what she’s given up for me. Our mutual sacrifice creates wounds that may never heal.