You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

Somehow, I had stopped noticing my body long enough for it to change.

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.

Not that day. Wearing my uncle’s baggy trousers, I enjoyed occupying blurred lines. Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space.

At the time, I couldn’t quite place the source of it. Had she noticed my contentment? Did it scare her? Only now, years later, do I think I understand. 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.

I communicated something to my mother as I stood there smiling in a pair of men’s pants, a message I didn’t know I was sending her. She has always known first what I have yet to discover, has always seen it before I could. Look at me, I wanted to say to her then. Please don’t look away.

What I enjoyed most about spinning records was the feeling of being in control, of being responsible for everyone’s good time.

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

“I don’t care what you choose to do anymore,” she said, and I crumbled. I needed her to care. Worse than anger was indifference: her approval was my compass, even when that meant resisting it. She then shot me a piercing look before shutting the cab door. “Good luck finding someone to love you like I did.”

Israeli soldiers in tan uniforms and laced-up combat boots pacing around checkpoints with machine guns, chewing gum and looking both vigilant and bored. These were my first images of the conflict that shattered our homeland and scattered my family. Terms like civilian casualties and Molotov cocktails and cease-fire, later replaced by negotiations and peace talks and Camp David, resounded in the Peter Jennings voiceovers as the footage of violence played on screen. We watched at a cool remove while enjoying the comforts of our American suburb, seemingly untouched, oblivious of the underlying trauma.

Depending on the political climate, some of our summer trips were worse than others when it came to crossing the Allenby, the main entry point into the West Bank for Palestinians living in the diaspora.

“It’s how I was raised,” she told me. “To please others. You know?”

I was loved from a distance, the safest way to be loved.

I 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.

As a child I would ask my mother what was wrong with him. “Why can’t he look me in the eye?” To which she would answer, “Because he’s afraid of women. In fact, he hates them.”

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 just think you should’ve told me that you’re a homosexual.” “Bisexual,” I corrected, cringing at her use of that word and hearing the echoes of Ahmadinejad’s voice. “The occasion didn’t really present itself.” “I get it, but it seems like a pretty big thing not to mention.”

But did it count as deception if it was done in the name of self-protection? Withholding vulnerable information was a habit born of survival. I’d been lulled into letting my guard down before, only to later regret it, the admissions used against me as I bore her wrath.

Getting me to stop smiling was a goal for all the counselors. According to them it was part of my armor. “We wear masks to protect ourselves, but they also keep us from being vulnerable,”

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’d been clinging to her I-love-yous like a refugee clings to a threatened nationality. They were the homeland that validated my existence.

“Read all you want,” she said with uncharacteristic authority. “But you’ll just end up a more informed prisoner.” A chill passed through me. I thought about that for a moment before I opened the book to where I’d left off.

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

“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. A few days earlier he’d asked if I was planning to do an H.I.T. list on Israel. “I thought about it,” I told him, though really I hadn’t. “But I’ve got too many people I’d like to do first.” “Alex says that you’re so pissed off all the time because you think you’re entitled to the land,” Greg continued, “but that the Torah promised it to his people.”

I admit that in the years since 2003, I’ve begun to expect significantly more when it comes to knowledge about the Middle East. 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.

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.

Laila Abu Sa’ab was certain to have a great life. She was born in between two catastrophic Israeli-Palestinian wars: ’48 and ’67. The second one broke out when she was eight years old. 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. Another wave of Palestinian displacement ensued. The possibility of a state called Palestine receded even further into the distance, becoming nearly unattainable.

On my last Sunday in group, I read aloud my goodbye letter to love addiction. “What will I find to replace you?” I asked rhetorically. “Hopefully the real thing. And if I don’t let you go, there won’t be any room for that.”

Baggage. No one ever breaks free from it. Everyone has to figure out how to go on living, to be decent, in spite of it.

“I end up regretting most of my decisions,” I respond. “So I guess I’m doomed either way.”

our relationship lukewarm, and for now that’s okay. Tara and I become fast friends based on shared daytime boredom and light evening alcoholism. Wanna meet on the front porch? she texts me a few nights after she moves in to the building. I could use a glass of vino.

I’ve discovered that having a job I dislike makes writing seem more appealing, an act of resisting against what I’m supposed be doing.