You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

  As a child I was lavished with attention for being Laila’s daughter. In fact, that was the extent of who I was. “Inti bint Laila?” You’re Laila’s daughter? “Yee! Habibti!” For years I would freeload off of my mother’s entitled adoration, reaping its benefits. I didn’t have to do a thing to be loved, I just had to be. But as I got older the same people who’d kissed and pinched my cheeks would try to talk to me, assuming that I possessed her charming attributes only to discover that I didn’t. My conversation was awkward, my gestures uncertain—a handshake or air kisses, and if the latter, two kisses or three? As an adult, my presence was off-putting.

  I took a deep breath and tried again. “When you told me you were beautiful and I was average, I felt bad, because that’s true, and I can’t believe you would actually say it to me.” My chest was heaving up and down, little bubbles rising like in water about to boil, rushing to the surface and popping in my throat. I couldn’t see anything, not the faces of the others around the circle, not the list on my lap, not Charlotte beside me. I didn’t want them to know these things. I didn’t want anyone to know. I felt something on my knee—Charlotte’s hand. “Tell her, ‘that’s not true.’ Tell her!” she snapped.

  “No.”

  “Say it!”

  “I can’t.” And I really couldn’t. “I want to go home!” Richard helped me up from the chair and onto my feet, but I collapsed into him, feeling exhausted and numb. He held me, kept holding me; he was so warm I didn’t want him to let go. He walked with me in his arms to Greg and rolled me into him. Greg squeezed me hard. Richard instructed me to get a hug from everyone, and I obeyed, passed from one person to another. When I arrived at Charlotte, I was sobered by the sight of her. Before she could hug me I sat down and tried to collect myself, straightening my back and wiping the tears off my face.

  In our room that night, Molly told me it was almost frightening, the way Charlotte seemed to be channeling me.

  “It was like she could relate to what you’ve been through,” Molly said. “She was genuinely upset when you were reading your list, which doesn’t surprise me. It was really sad.”

  It’s true: she had seemed upset. It was validating, in a way, but I didn’t want Molly to know how much it meant to me. “Please,” I said, folding my pillow in half and turning onto my side. 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’m not particularly fond of horses. I took a riding lesson once as a kid, and while walking the horse to the ring, it stepped on my foot and refused to move for a good five minutes. “Horses have a unique ability to heal,” said the equine therapist, a stout woman with a thick straw-colored braid, once we’d all arrived in the stable. Several horses trotted by, raising their tails and kicking up dirt. The place felt more like an oversized playpen than an actual barn. “Today, you’re going to work together to bridle Misty here.” Misty snapped her tail and some flies scattered. A glob of drool fell from her mouth.

  Alex took charge and started mapping out distances: the length between Misty’s mouth and her back, the width between the bit pieces and the reins. Greg rubbed her snout and talked to her. Molly dusted off the saddle and wiped down her coat with a wet sponge she’d found in a bucket. I stood off to the side, wondering how petting a horse would benefit us in any way, and if the others were actually buying into it. It seemed so, given how pleased they were with their creative solutions, the herd of independent minds. Once Misty was all dolled up in her bridle, the therapist instructed us to sit on the log bench so we could discuss the activity. She paced back and forth like a drill sergeant. “Give yourselves a pat on the back,” she said to us. “You all did an excellent job.” Alex reached out for a high five, which she met with a heavy smack. Greg even tapped his own shoulder like an idiot. “Except for you,” she said to me. “You just kind of checked out and wandered off.”

  I felt immediately compelled to defend myself. “I was still paying attention,” I said, “but my group seemed to have it under control.”

  “Ah, so you’re a freeloader?”

  “I’m just saying they didn’t need any more help, and I only like to do what’s necessary.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Well, how do you know what’s necessary, what you might be missing, unless you try it?”

  But that was precisely my issue: wanting to try everything, and everyone. “I guess I don’t,” I said.

  Next, she asked us to pick a horse and observe it. “What do you mean by observe it?” Molly asked.

  “Whatever you want that to mean,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air, as if the thought of what we might come up with could be that exciting. “You can observe it up close, or from afar, or however you want.”

  After deciding to participate this time, I chose a mare in the distance and approached her slowly. When I reached out to touch her neck, she turned away. She snubbed the hay I tried to feed her as if I’d offered up a cow patty. “Fine, then.” I sat down on a sunny patch of grass and watched the others. Greg’s horse didn’t appear interested in him, either, yet he was persistent. He tried smoothing out her mane, and every time she shook him away, he tried harder. “Figures,” I muttered as I peeled apart a blade of grass. Molly made a garland out of dandelions and put it around her horse’s neck. Alex stood scratching his head, his eyebrows in the upright position as his horse neighed at increasingly higher octaves. Soon the therapist instructed us to round up all the horses and bring them back to the barn. I tried to lure the mare along, holding an even bigger pile of hay a few feet in front of her. She stood there until another horse walked by, then trotted along beside it.

  We piled back onto the log bench and waited for the therapist’s diagnosis. “Looks like you’re really starting to come together as a team,” she said, “which is what it’s all about here.”

  I was ready to accept the compliment when she darted a finger at me. “Yet again, you just sort of sat back and relaxed during that.”

  “I was respecting the horse’s boundaries.”

  “Oh?”

  “Clearly, she wanted to be alone, and I wasn’t going to force myself on her. No one likes that. Not even horses.”

  She put her hands on her hips and nodded slowly. “Fair enough. But did you ever stop and think it might be your approach?”

  I shrugged. “I tried giving her hay a few times but she didn’t respond to it.”

  “Do you know what the definition of insanity is?”

  I mumbled, “It’s doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

  “Right. And whatever that thing is, it’s precisely what landed you here.”

  8

  NINE DAYS DOWN. NINETEEN TO GO. BY THEN I WAS counting down with dread, rather than anticipation. At the end of group on Thursday, Charlotte told us that we’d be working with just Richard for the weekend, as she would be out until Monday. I was suddenly reminded of the artifice of the place. For them it was just a job; they left at the end of each day and stopped thinking about our problems. Instead they thought about their own: what they’d cook for dinner, their kids’ homework, bills. Still, after Charlotte told us she’d be out, the noise in the room faded and all I could hear was my pulse. As everyone got up and headed outside to the vans, I stayed behind.

  “Charlotte!” I called out without meaning to. “I’m not feeling well.”

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  I wasn’t sure what to say to her. “I’m just very anxious.” I started rubbing my thighs with my palms as though I was trying to start a fire.

  “I’m going to lead you through some breathing exercises,” she said. “Take my hands—”

  “No,” I said too emphatically as I pushed back in my chair.

  “Okay, then just count to ten with me.” We counted out loud in unison. I was painfully aware of the sound of my own voice. When we finally got to te
n, she asked what was going on.

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

  “Acting out, how?” she asked. “Is it your anorexia?”

  “No.” She’d read my file, of course. “I kicked that one. Well, sort of. I went to treatment for it a few years ago . . .”

  “You’re still recovering.” She smiled. “I understand. I have an eating disorder, too.”

  I’d already suspected this, that we had this in common. I had watched her careful choices at the lunch buffet, noticing that she’d skip over mashed potatoes and pile on extra string beans or steamed carrots. I’d also pieced together a few random personal details based on things she’d mentioned in group, along with a few conversations I’d overheard between her and Richard: she was forty-five, married with two kids, and had been to treatment for meth addiction. “So what is it, then?” she asked.

  “I feel myself acting out in my love addiction,” I said, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. I couldn’t use the term without wanting to mock it immediately afterward. The label was like something out of a teen movie, or some cheesy pick-up line—“Baby, I’m a love addict, and I need one more hit of you.”

  “Well, what does acting out look like for you?” she asked.

  It usually started with the hollows of a particular collarbone—the professor’s, the nutritionist’s, the editorial assistant’s, anyone’s other than my actual partner’s—growing into a full-fledged obsession with whomever they belonged to. In an attempt to escape my thoughts, I’d solicit and seduce others to the point of mental annihilation, only to wake up the next morning with my obsession fortified. Alcohol made it worse. So did drugs. Exercise, especially when combined with a playlist, was nearly lethal. And the factors that elevated the behavior from “bad crush” to addiction were time and intensity, as well as the compulsive behavior that accompanied it; namely, fucking to forget.

  But at the Ledge, I was limited. “I guess it just means fantasizing,” I said.

  “Can you tell me who it is you’re fantasizing about?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t. I don’t mean to be cryptic.” I put my elbows on my knees and pressed my fingers to my temples. “I can’t believe this is happening here.”

  “Well, sometimes, they say that when your addiction finds you in treatment, it’s your higher power forcing you toward something you don’t want to face.” I tried not to remark on the mention of a higher power, which I’d regretted doing the first time. “Let me ask, do these people that you ‘fall for’”—she made air quotes—“all have something in common?”

  “What do you mean by ‘in common’?” I asked.

  “You know, like it’s guys with dark hair, or guys with glasses, or something like that?”

  •

  When I got off the train in Florence from Paris via Turin, I realized I knew almost nothing in Italian. Not even hello. I knew “ti amo,” as Kate had started signing off her emails with it when she returned from her semester abroad, the emails she sent asking if we could still be friends, a request she stopped making after a bar fight and a slap across my face. But that was the only expression I knew.

  Why Italy? Kate, for one. I spent most of the semester Kate was abroad in my room, listening to Kind of Blue and feeling sorry for myself, wondering how many Italians she had slept with so far. Eventually I broke into her email and found out: all of them. I became enamored with the place, thinking that by experiencing it for myself and taking over a space that seemed to belong to her, I could conquer the pain and eliminate her from my memory. But by the time I graduated and boarded the plane, the pain of Kate had subsided, replaced by another relationship, another heartbreak. 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.

  It took me five years to finish college. After transferring to a new school, I took medical leave for a condition known informally as lollipop head syndrome, caused by acute anorexia. I finally graduated and returned to D.C. I spent that summer working at a coffee shop on Capitol Hill and living with my mother, money saved at a price much greater than rent. Our interactions were practically marital: I’d help her make decisions about travel, pick up dinner for us, deal with the bills. She seemed to think of me as a husband while still treating me like a child she could reprimand at any moment. By the end of August I could afford to buy a round-trip ticket to Europe. I left in early September and wouldn’t be home for twelve months. By the time the trip arrived, I couldn’t stand to stay at my mother’s house for one more day.

  “Via delle Carra,” I said to the bus driver outside the Santa Maria Novella station in Florence. It was the name of my street, and the first Italian words I’d ever spoken. I had rented myself an apartment before getting to Florence. I got to the building and walked into the courtyard, where a group of young people sat playing cards and drinking. They offered me a glass of Chianti and I spent the evening drinking with them. There was a redhead from Copenhagen who worked in a local government office. There was a chef from Kerala who lived in Liverpool and had an effortful Cockney accent. There was a journalist from Madrid who wrote a weekly fashion column. And a designer from Prague, who spoke with a lisp and looked like she was post-lollipop, too. Everyone was referred to by their country of origin. They called me Palestina.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Sleep would take away from my time there. Instead I stayed up with my Let’s Go Italy guidebook, marking cities where I wanted to travel. Siena or Cinque Terre? Definitely Naples, which I’d heard was a lot like Nablus, pre-’48. Sicily, if I didn’t run out of money by spring. I felt intoxicated by my levity. For the first time in years, I was bound to no one.

  The following afternoon I enrolled in beginning Italian at the Dante Alighieri language school on Piazza della Repubblica. Every weekday I had lessons from nine to one with a mid-morning break at ten forty-five, which I would use to run across the street for an espresso. Sometimes I went to the deli next door for a pecorino sandwich or a Perugina chocolate. One morning a girl from class followed me there.

  “Hey,” a voice from behind me called. “Which is the flat kind?”

  “What?” I turned around and looked where the girl’s finger was pointing, at the bottled water, two kinds, marked frizzante and naturale. “Oh,” I said. “Naturale.”

  “You’re in my class,” she said. She had blue eyes and blond hair, half a dozen friendship bracelets on each forearm, and the deepest voice I had ever heard out of a female. It was incongruous with her soft appearance, like a ballerina chewing tobacco. I chose a sandwich from the display and the man at the register rang me up. The girl grabbed a tray and asked, “Can I sit with you?”

  We sat at a table outside with our sandwiches. Just as I was taking my first bite, she pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes. “Want one?”

  She was Dutch. Just finished high school, here for her gap year. Her older sister, who was twenty-three like me, did hers in Barcelona. She hoped she’d made the right decision by choosing Italy over Spain. She had one friend so far, a Salvadoran named Agos, also here for her gap year. They lived in a house with a bunch of American sorority girls. “They’re loud as hell,” she said, smooshing her cigarette onto the sidewalk and finally picking up her sandwich. “And it’s fucking annoying.”

  “I live in a pretty cool building,” I told her. “You should come hang out sometime.”

  “Can I come tonight?”

  She showed up at seven, while my housemates were pregaming in the courtyard, the Keralan chef serving plates of penne with fresh marinara sauce. When she got up to use the bathroom, he asked, “Who’s this blond bombshell you’ve brought to us? She’s gorgeous!” The rest of the guys nodded along and chimed in with added praise.

  All I saw was the blond hair, and after Kate I’d stopped
noticing blondes. “I didn’t ‘bring her’ to you,” I responded. “She’s not some sort of sacrificial offering.”

  They nicknamed her the Sacrifice.

  After that night the Sacrifice followed me everywhere. At first I found it irritating, a lost puppy trailing me wherever I went. She even showed me how to pedal my bike with her seated on the back. “It’s how we do it in Holland,” she said.

  And so I pedaled through cobblestoned streets with the Sacrifice sitting behind me. We rode along the Arno River, over the Ponte Vecchio, all the way to Piazza de Michelangelo, way above the city, where a statue of the artist towers over Florence. In time I got used to the extra weight. And when it was absent, I found myself missing it.

  •

  Three months before Italy, I was living at my mother’s apartment in Washington and learning how to call a coffee order. The various properties of a signature beverage—tall, grande, venti, skim, two percent, whole, extra shot, added flavor—had to be called to my “partner” at the espresso machine in the order that they were listed on the cup. After work I would return to the apartment, take off my apron, eat the free sandwich I’d received for working back-to-back shifts, and watch television.

  I’d finally graduated, but had no idea what I wanted to do. So I accompanied my mother on her social outings. I would sit there smiling silently, my presence politely tolerated and largely ignored by my mother’s friends. They all treated me like I was ten—“where’s mama?” they’d ask if she left the table for a minute. But one friend of my mother’s, a new friend who began coming to these outings more and more often, spoke to me like I was at least out of kindergarten. Each time I saw her she’d make a point to talk to me, a rarity among the others. I began to expect and look forward to it each time we went out. She’d asked what my plans were, did I want to stay in D.C., would I apply to grad school. She was attractive if not beautiful, her features dark and severe, except for her eyes, which were blue. It’s rare for an Arab. She was Palestinian too, married to an ambassador, and from what I knew she played her role well.