You Exist Too Much - Zaina Arafat

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the security of a relationship, longing felt less safe. It felt lonely.

      As I sat alone in my apartment, I thought back to that night at the restaurant in SoHo, the last time I’d seen or spoken to my mother, by then nearly a month earlier. I’d trailed behind her all the way to the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Once I caught up to her, she stuck out her hand to hail a taxi. One pulled over immediately. She opened the door, and before stepping in she turned to me, her top lip resting on her lower lip in that furious non-smile. “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.”

      I WAS FOUR WHEN THE FIRST INTIFADA BEGAN. AS A FAMILY, we would gather around the box-shaped TV in our wood-paneled basement in the D.C. suburbs and watch the seven o’clock news. I would spread out on the floor, taking in scenes of distant carnage while laying my Barbies atop one another in unintentional 69 positions. Karim would spring up and down in his bouncy chair. My father would pour some of the newly introduced Cool Ranch Doritos into one ceramic bowl and medium-spicy Old El Paso salsa into another. He’d then empty an already-cold Heineken bottle into a frosted pilsner glass from the freezer. Often I’d go searching for chocolate chip ice cream and instead find mulukhiya, a vegetable you could only ever find in Middle Eastern supermarkets, along with the frosted glasses on the freezer shelves. My mother was the only one who kept her eyes glued to the television, the distance from her homeland enhancing her longing and attachment as she felt it slip away.

      On the television screen, scenes appeared from Nablus of coffins shrouded in Palestinian flags. Young men in stonewashed jeans and bandanas peeking out from behind graffitied walls and stacks of flaming tires, throwing a seemingly endless supply of stones. 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.

       4

      “YOUR LAST STOP BEFORE HEALING.” THE WORDS WERE displayed in bubbly cursive across the Ledge’s homepage. I’d stumbled upon the website after a semi-targeted search with the words destructive, relationships, help.

      I was mildly put off by the fatalistic tagline, but I was also desperate. The past week alone in the apartment had felt like a year. The days I’d tried to spend writing dragged on with no productivity. I was constantly aware of Anna’s absence, each time I sat down on the couch and she wasn’t on the other end, or ate takeout for one at the kitchen table, or when I crawled into bed at night, now at a reasonable hour, since I no longer DJed. I could never fall asleep, so instead I’d watch reruns of shows I’d already seen dozens of times. Anything that entailed minimal thinking. I couldn’t resist reading through the emails she had found, cowering in embarrassment, imagining her reading them. Soon I began taking pills to numb the pain—I’d gotten the number for a notoriously irresponsible psychiatrist whose contact info had made the rounds among my coworkers at the club. He put me on a cycle of amphetamines during the day and Xanax at night, to come down and get a bit of sleep. The uppers had the added benefit of stripping away the need to nourish myself, my appetite for food entirely diminished. Soon I was stick-thin, almost back to my pre-recovery weight, which provided a comfort akin to an old friend and a semblance of control. Each day I woke to an excruciating crash, the pain-numbing meds no longer in my system, and thus the cycle began again. I wanted nothing more than to escape my life.

      In an attempt to do so, I went out every night, sometimes with friends, often alone, situating myself on a bar stool, pushing my chest forth as I scanned the room in the hope that I might meet someone, anyone—for love or for sex, either would do. I revived every flirtatious email chain, but no one wrote back—not one bite. I needed a distraction. I regretted quitting my DJ gig so early in the summer, and I tried to undo the mistake. But when I went to the club to ask for my job back, or at least a few shifts, the owner told me that he’d already hired someone else. Apparently I was easy to replace. By the time I got home I felt suffocated by depression. Desperate, I turned to the internet.

      I clicked through the various pages on the Ledge’s website. The place was in Bowling Green, Kentucky, a two-hour drive from Louisville. That was one of the few concrete things I came away with; the site was rather cryptic—what exactly was this place? Healing, how? I clicked to the “Contact Us” tab, where an email address and a phone number were listed. I began to draft an email, then decided it was easier to just call. It rang four times before someone picked up. “This is Nancy,” said a strikingly upbeat voice on the other end.

      “Oh,” I said, startled. “Hi!” I hadn’t expected an actual human to answer, more like a somber recording. “I think I called the wrong number.”

      “Are you looking for the Ledge?”

      “Yes.”

      “Well, then you’ve got the right number! What brings you to us?” She sounded breezy, too casual, as though she were taking my order at a drive-through.

      “I don’t know exactly,” I said. I looked at the wall in front of me, where Anna’s cat clock eyed me accusingly. “I guess I just know I need help.”

      Nancy proceeded to ask me a series of questions about my childhood—“happy until it wasn’t”—my family—“if you can still call it that”—my relationships. I told her about the professor, about Anna, our breakup. “I’m not sure what’s wrong with me,” I said.

      “Let me ask you,” said Nancy, “have you ever heard of something called love addiction?”

      “No,” I said. “Is that a real thing?”

      “Do me a favor,” she said. “Look it up. And feel free to call us back afterward.”

      At the Strand bookstore that evening, I slinked into the personal growth section. Google had informed me that a woman named Pia Mellody, who ran a treatment center in Arizona that was far more expensive than the Ledge, was the foremost expert on love addiction. She sounded like a character out of a self-help fairy tale; I pictured her with a tiara and a wand. I picked Facing Love Addiction off the shelf and opened it to the beginning: “Love addicts have an uncontrollable appetite for the object of their affection.”

      Her Barthesian language was slightly off-putting, but I felt soothed by the sentiment. “When love addicts reach a certain level of closeness with their actual partner, they often panic and do something to create distance. Frightened by healthy intimacy, they devote an obsessive amount of time, attention, and value to someone who cannot or will not love them back.” I ran through the list in my head: The nutritionist. The editorial assistant. The ambassador’s wife. The sacrifice. The professor. And in a way, Kate. I kept reading: “Unable to be present in their own relationships, they find an escape hatch to numb the pain.”

      I felt myself light up—this was a real, diagnosable condition! One that seemed to perfectly circumscribe my behavior. It was a designation that abstracted my obsessions from all context and almost sanctified them, while obscuring their actual source.

      I bought the book and tucked it deep in my bag.

      I called the Ledge again at nine a.m. the next day. Nancy picked up. “Morning!” she said, chipper as an Egg McMuffin.

      “I read about love addiction,” I said. “Do you treat

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