You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

“Mama! Don’t leave me! I need you!” And so my mother stayed in Canada. I spent the weekdays in Saint-Alexis-des-Monts, and on the weekends I took a bus to Montreal. I’d sob when I had to leave her on Sunday afternoons. The routine persisted for the entire month of July, until finally, we went home.

It wasn’t long before she discovered Cafe Milano, a place where politicians, lobbyists, and the occasional Hollywood actor schmoozed. George Clooney once offered her a seat at his table. “Where are you going?” I would ask as headlights seared through my bedroom window, her friend honking from the driveway.

One night, when I called Café Milano, the hostess told me that my mother refused to come to the phone. When I heard the rumble of the garage a few hours later, I came running down the stairs to embrace her, and she immediately smacked me across the face. I never called the restaurant again, or worried about accidents.

I imagined her sitting at an empty table in a model home kitchen, her business cards beside her in an untouched stack, waiting for someone to show up. I thought about the other real estate agents at the firm with perfect English, who continued to secure clients despite the recession. I thought of the bills that arrived at her one-bedroom apartment, now solely her responsibility. She wasn’t supposed to be paying bills alone. Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way for Laila Abu Sa’ab, but she had chosen the wrong marriage and the wrong life. And though she resented me because of it—I was, by default, the wrong daughter—I also understood.

Acknowledgment + Approval – Mother’s Unconditional Love = Attraction. Good luck finding someone to love you like I did.

In truth, I was nervous about leaving. I’d come to enjoy knowing what I’d be doing every day, and having no choice in the matter. In fact, not having to choose was one of the best parts about being at the Ledge; the only decisions I made involved which salad dressing I was in the mood for, or what T-shirt to wear. Being limited was surprisingly nice. I took comfort in unambiguous priorities, in having no choice in the matter; certainty by default.

The living room walls blared with blankness, something I hadn’t noticed before. Had Anna taken artwork with her? Had there been any up to begin with? She did leave the ticking cat clock, which felt intentional.

“Remember,” I said aloud, and it echoed through the empty chamber of yet another new home. “You have to make room for the real thing.”

I’d stand against a stone wall while a man carved up knafeh that steamed atop a large gold saucer of a tray, strands of cheese hanging down from the spatula as he plated slices and passed them around.

and once spent a full day trying to open a heavy wooden door that turned out to be the front door. It hadn’t been used since 1948, the year they stopped hosting parties, the year of the Nakba, when nearly a million Palestinians were exiled from their land.

“My father cried so much when the soldiers came,” Teta would tell me again and again, “but he wouldn’t leave his house.” Instead, the soldiers moved in and lived alongside the entire family, including my grandmother and her siblings. “They slept in the garden,” Teta would say.

house to play in the neighbors’ yard. One of my early memories in Nablus is of gunshots. I was six years old, sitting on the neighbor’s swing set, when I heard the rapid-fire popping sounds. I jumped off the swing and began to run. Though I was only next door, in the moment I didn’t know how to find my way back home.

But I remember. Perhaps because I want to. I can just as easily forget when I want.

MATÍAS IS A VISITING FELLOW AT MY MFA PROGRAM. He’s in town from Argentina for the fall semester to work on his fourth novel.

I think about intimacy as I’d learned about it over the summer: “Into-me-you-see.”

“It’s so comfortable with you,” he says. “It feels like we’re talking in bed.” The presumption of his comment is both off-putting and impressive.

Afterward, after he’s pulled me onto his lap, carried me to bed, and made love to me, sweat drips off his nose and onto my chest. “Is it all right if I stay?” he asks.

He wants to see a picture of her, and I pull a photo album out from a desk drawer, one that I put together several years ago and carry with me from city to city. There are pictures of her on almost every spread in the album, and I feel pride when he tells me she’s beautiful. “She is, isn’t she,” I say, running my fingers across the cellophaned ridges of the page.

Sorry to ask, but do you have any knowledge of Matías’s whereabouts? He’s not on the bus with everyone else.

The spinning is out of control and I know it would help to get to the nearest Twelve Step meeting—any kind. “It’s all the same,” Richard said on my first day at the Ledge, and by now I understand what he meant. But instead of looking up meetings, I scroll through my phone to find the number of a Lebanese med student I met at a a coffee shop last week. I overheard him speaking in Arabic over the phone, which led to a conversation and him giving me his number. I send him a message: Any plans tonight?

I’ll call you as soon as I can.” Right then, I know. All the unnecessary exposition, the time between emails. As if to confirm my suspicions Matías calls seven times that night. I don’t pick up his first call. He leaves two messages. The first is breezy; the second, panicked. “Is everything okay? Why aren’t you answering? I’m starting to worry.”

All along I knew what I was doing was wrong, that I was dangerously close to a precipice. But still, I need to fall in order to stop.

“Of course. They’ve been seeing each other for a while now.” “Are you sure?” “I’m sure,” she says. “I would’ve told you myself, but I had no idea you were still together.” In that moment, I am surprised that rather than feeling angry or sad, I feel relieved.

“Ahlan wa Sahlan!” says my mother. I take a deep breath as the sound of her voice courses through my veins. “How are you, mama?” she asks.

She called ten minutes later, and right then we’re running through our calendars, each remembering nights we weren’t with him, the lies he’d told about staying in to work when in fact he was with one of us.

“Of course you love me,” I snap back, if only to keep my ego intact. “I have no doubt that you love me.” I begin to laugh crazily. “I gave you the most authentic parts of me,” I tell him. At least this is what I want to believe, that I’ve practiced healthy intimacy with him, despite how much I’ve actually withheld.

“Not a word,” Claire says. “You?” I hesitate. When you don’t want to lose someone, it’s so tempting to deceive them.

GREG’S DEAD.” IT’S THE FIRST LINE OF MOLLY’S EMAIL. Blunt, with nothing there to soften it. “He overdosed in a parking lot. I wanted to tell you over the phone but you never answer when I call.”

While I was in treatment I heard about others who’d checked out and died soon afterward. They overdosed, drove drunk, committed suicide. It was hard to make sense of these incidents, especially since everyone I encountered left the Ledge seemed so determined to get clean and sober. At what point did that resolve fade? After a few months, a few weeks? On the car ride home?

The Arab Enthusiast is a twenty-two-year-old Oriental Studies major—they still call it that out here. He’s a native Midwesterner, a double black belt in jiujitsu, and the linchpin in my attempts to distract myself until Matías returns.

He had just come back from the West Bank, so we had plenty to talk about on our first date. He’d been once before—with Birthright Unplugged in high school, the alternative to Birthright Israel, which involves touring the occupied West Bank.

“So you’re Jewish, but Pro-Palestinian?” I asked as he chalked the tip of a pool cue. “Do you get a lot of heat for that?” “Sure.” He shot his stick and sank two balls. “But I’m not changing my beliefs because of it.”

The idea of him resisting on Palestine’s behalf left me both thrilled and certain that I should invite him home with me.

I’ve seen the Enthusiast almost every evening since. Tonight he’s over at my apartment. We watched a documentary about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement before making our way to my bedroom.

“Just so you know,” she says, “anything you told me stays between us.” It’s a nice assurance, but unnecessary—by now I’ve grown more comfortable telling these stories.

Her observations become increasingly suggestive, her questions more leading. Most of our conversations feel intentionally weighted, though maybe I’m imbuing them with intention. One night we arrive at the end of a bottle around midnight, at which point it’s time for her to go back to her apartment.

I kiss her. At first it just feels like mouth on mouth, lips against lips.

I pull back the waistband of her fishnets and place my hand beneath them. I ask her if it’s too much. No, she says, it’s not.

By a weird and unexpected coincidence, Tara and I are both offered positions to teach at the same satellite campus of an American university in the UAE.

When I can no longer put off responding I delete the draft and write a new letter to decline the position.

The next morning, I decide to move back to New York once the semester ends. It’s a decision propelled by a barely audible survival instinct, a whisper—Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.

A, as I knew her through OKCupid, suggested two possible meeting spots. “One is quieter,” she wrote, “the other louder and more lively.” A quieter bar seemed like a more adult choice and therefore the right answer.

The next morning she texts me: I woke up today feeling less sad than usual.

And whenever she catches me projecting idealized versions of herself onto her, she calls me out for doing so. Throughout our relationship, she insists on remaining real.

I nod in response to Anouk’s question. “People have left me,” I say. “Though I guess it’s usually me who leaves.”

It’s a Thursday, so the border crossing is crowded with commuters trying to return home to the West Bank before Friday, the Muslim holy day.

I breathe deeply and gaze out the window at the Jordan River passing beneath the bridge, which serves as the demarcation line between Jordan, to the east, and Israel and Palestine, to the west. It’s really just an idyllic stream running over stones and between muddy banks. But the word river makes arbitrary borders seem inevitable.

Almost two hours later a soldier approaches me, casually slapping against her leg a passport that I assume is mine.

“Can I ask you to not stamp it, please?” “Why not?” “Because I plan to go back to Lebanon. To Beirut,” I emphasize. Mine is a common request, and depending on the particular official, it is either honored or it isn’t.

We tell stories about the time she thought she’d gone blind while driving, only to realize she’d entered a tunnel with her sunglasses on; the time she stayed up all night playing the slots in Atlantic City, then slept on the floor of our shared hotel room to avoid waking us; the time she bought six-inch patent leather heels at age seventy-three.