You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

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 tried to word it in treatment terms. “I feel myself acting out.”

Still, I felt an urge to inhabit a new place, to detach myself from anything that felt familiar: the U.S., Jordan, Palestine. Those places all had notes in the margin that proved distracting. In order to think, I needed blank sheets.

He asked me why I chose to live in Italy, and not Palestine or Jordan. “I don’t know,” I said, 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. Every country outside of my own felt like a luxury, and at twenty-three, I wanted to indulge. In a way I felt I deserved to. “I have no responsibilities here,” I said. “And no ties to anyone.” He smiled, and his white beard spread like smoke. “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.”

“Ampy, make Lipton,” she said to the housekeeper.

After that first night, I only saw the ambassador’s wife at her house, usually in her bedroom, after she had come home from whatever gala, whatever dinner, whatever event.

I remembered Karim and me riding in the back of a cop car to the station at three a.m. We sat in a waiting room, not knowing where exactly they’d taken our parents. We held each other and wept until someone came and offered us blankets and candy that neither of us wanted.

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 am not an object—I’m not just Laila’s daughter. I exist!

“I suppose it’s usually unattainable women.” “Unattainable, how?” she asked. “Like they’re straight,” I said. “Or married. Or there’s a professional boundary.” I looked off to the side, away from her. “Or all of the above.” I was certain right then that she knew.

By the time school started the next day I was desperately missing Jordan. 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.

“Let’s say I was to write you a love letter,” the nutritionist said to me during group three summers ago, and all the other lollipop heads turned to look at me as if something had actually transpired. “I would need to eat carbs to have the energy for that.”

We once spent a week sharing a single bed in Beirut, where her extended family lived—as ’48ers rather than ’67 Palestinians, their fate was to be exiled to camps in Lebanon rather than live under occupation—and where I had “coincidentally” planned to be that summer.

I only stayed a few days—I’d driven from Jordan, something you could do back then, when Syria was still intact—and tried to keep my flirtations restrained so that her parents wouldn’t suspect my intentions.

“Were you two doing what I think you were doing?” she’d asked. “No!” we’d responded in unison. In fact, I had just given him a blow job, hoping that it would distract us both from the things we really wanted.

Had I? I realized then that I had never confessed my feelings to any of the women. Not even to Kate. For

Molly shook her head and smiled. “Read all you want,” she said with uncharacteristic authority. “But you’ll just end up a more informed prisoner.”

Kate tilted her head back a little too far and laughed. “Don’t worry. We’re just, you know, ‘experimenting.’”

I’m not sure how long I’d been sitting there when a cop appeared and tapped on the plastic driver’s-side window. Instead of unzipping it, I opened the door and spilled out of the car. “She’s sleeping with someone else,” I cried as I stumbled into the policeman. “And I’m falling in love with her.” He collected me in his arms as I thrashed against his chest, tipsy passersby stopping to view the spectacle. I imagined that in fear, if not compassion, he dropped the charge from a DUI to underage possession. He called a cab and sent me home.

I made sure to get a little smudge of orange sauce on my T-shirt, so she wouldn’t forget what she’d done.

“Let’s never again.” When she smashed another dish the following year I slit my wrist with a piece of it. Blood dripped all over the linoleum. She took me to get stitches and didn’t leave my side for a week.

Once, as I sat naked in her bed, we both glanced at my reflection in the window and noticed the vertebrae of my spine through my skin. “You’re getting really thin,” she said. “I’m scared I might shatter you.” At work one evening I overheard my boss say to the bartender, “That girl who comes in here, the blonde?” he nodded in Kate’s direction as she hovered over the pool table about to sink the eight ball. “I want to fuck her until her back shatters.”

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 want to marry you,” she said one night as we lay wrapped in a sheet on the floor, having slid like salamanders off the bed. I winced with fear and a fleeting disgust. A relationship with a woman meant failure: I had failed to get a man, failed to find something normal, failed to not be pathetic.

The more she pulled away, the less food I consumed. 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.

I sniffled and snorted and tried to suck back snot and tears, which only made me cry harder. I’m aware I can be exhausting—“you exist too much,” my mother often told me.

As Kate left for Florence, I headed to a new college town, one that was even more preppy, Greek, and white.

As she pulled away I leaned forward and kissed her, pressing my mouth to hers. She jumped back. “What are you doing?” “I, I’m sorry, I thought . . .” I didn’t know what to say. I stood there, horrified. What the hell was I doing? Had I just messed everything up? “It’s okay.” She shrugged. “We drank a lot.”

“Now,” Greg said, folding a pepperoni slice in half, “the Palestinians have no legitimate claim on Jerusalem, right? Because that’s what Alex says.” It turned out that after we went back to our rooms at night, Alex had been giving Greg lectures in Arab-Israeli affairs. A self-proclaimed Zionist, he came at the issue from a different vantage point than I did, to say the least.

The fact that I grew up outside the Middle East doesn’t make me feel less Arab. I speak the language, albeit cautiously and brokenly, often failing to get the correct pronunciation and inflection.

I’ve marched and protested on the Washington Mall in support of ending government funding for foreign occupations 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.

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.

As a child I was made starkly aware of our nonconformity when my friends would come over and ask why my parents were going out to dinner at nine p.m.—on a Tuesday. Why wasn’t my mother wearing mom jeans, but rather, formfitting leather Moschinos? Why did my father call me “daddy” and speak to me half in English, half in Arabic? 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.

The best we could hope to achieve was camaraderie among ourselves, united in our outcast status. 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.

Each time, I refused to ask for their names or offer mine. I would always accompany them to their places, never to my shared sublet, to guarantee that I could leave before dawn, with no risk of intimacy or even sober interaction.

The second time we had sex, she fucked me with a strap on.

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

“Beyakhud el a’el,” she said, stepping back and smiling. Her words reverberated through my mind. In that moment, the morning’s pedicure incident no longer mattered—I’d gotten it right this time. The desire to hear her say that motivated me to get from moment to moment, day to day.

This wasn’t normal: I shouldn’t have gotten so upset, I shouldn’t have lost control the way I did. I needed help, I thought to myself, and then remembered that I was getting help. But it just didn’t feel like I was getting any better.

After confessing I felt hollow. Deflated, like someone had popped a balloon that had filled up inside me. I could feel my shame morphing into anger, and suddenly I was furious. It didn’t seem fair that I longed for this woman I hardly knew. It didn’t seem fair that I was there at all.

Laila Abu Sa’ab was certain to have a great life. She was born in between two catastrophic Israeli-Palestinian wars: ’48 and ’67.

In less than a week, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria lost control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula.

She remembers that her youngest brother went to an Israeli prison eight times when they were teenagers, the stays ranging from nineteen to forty-five days, for throwing rocks at armed soldiers and trying to muster up his own resistance movement.

“The thing about education,” her father said to her the day of her college graduation, which coincided with a sharp increase in Israeli settlement construction on confiscated land in the West Bank, “is that no one can take it away from you. Everything else can be stolen. Everything else can be lost.”

Grad school applications had been replaced by wedding plans.

The day Laila became a mother, and me, a daughter, we were the only ones there to greet each other.

On the fifteen-year anniversary of the war that had ravaged her hometown, Laila gave birth to me, her first child, a daughter.

Besides, Washington was more like Palestine: densely populated, noisy, and filled with more Arabs than Palos Verdes.

“Do you know why you fell?” he asks. “Why?” “Because you were touching the flowers!” A non sequitur, but I accept his logic as valid. In the video Laila laughs behind the camera. “Something to remember,” she says.