You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

Like I could get attention from boys, from girls. I felt, for once, seen.

Are you a boy or a girl?

I enjoyed occupying blurred lines. Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space.

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

The trousers were a demarcation line, one that separated me from my mother and her lineage.

She has always known first what I have yet to discover, has always seen it before I could.

Please don’t look away.

Then she leaned forward and kissed me.

The experience was new enough that I still felt a wave of exhilaration at the ability to kiss a woman in public, as though what we were doing was illicit, two high schoolers smoking pot on the football field.