You Exist Too Much. Zaina Arafat

notion that everyone will eventually cease to exist brings me great comfort and temporary courage. Often I try to visualize the coming apocalypse: barren tree branches, scrap metal, tumbleweed. As the images appear in my head, a wave begins to curl in my stomach. Together they propel me forward, and I act.

      Right then, it wasn’t working. I kept trying, but all I could picture was Nancy. When I opened my eyes, I focused my gaze on the floor. It was as if by not looking at anyone, they couldn’t see me either.

      Toys were scattered all over. Nerf guns, bouncy balls, teddy bears. I noticed a bongo drum in the corner. I sat down on a denim-duveted love seat while two guys arm-wrestled on the opposite couch. One of them had sun-bleached hair that was almost white, thick muscles, and a strong jaw. I watched him pin down the other guy’s forearm. “Booyeah!” he called out, claiming victory. He then looked up at me. “Hey, little lady,” he said. “I’m Greg. What’re you in for?”

      I was surprised by the bluntness of his question. “What’re you in for?” I asked in return.

      “Heroin.”

      My stomach twitched, and for a moment I wondered if I wasn’t supposed to be there.

      “I want you to really sift through your baggage and face it.” That line from Anna’s last email played in my mind like a chorus. I’d held on to her words, as if they justified coming to such a place. Anna and I hadn’t spoken for weeks until right before treatment. She’d ignored all my attempts to communicate—every call, text, and email—until the night before my twenty-eight days. She picked up, as though she could sense my desperation. “I’m scared,” I confessed. “I don’t want to do this.”

      Anna said nothing, just breathed heavily into the phone as I continued. “But I know I need to, even if it won’t fix things with us.” She kept breathing in a way that I recognized, a way that used to betray hesitancy. “Right?”

      “Yes,” she finally responded. “That’s exactly right.”

      I asked Greg where he was from. South Carolina. His voice was deep and his mouth barely moved when he spoke. “I’ve been to Charleston once,” I told him, not mentioning that I’d felt completely strange there, like the only Arab for hundreds of miles, maybe thousands. I asked him about the toys.

      “They’re for when we do inner child work,” he said, picking up a stuffed turtle from beside him. It was awkward, the sight of the furry innocent thing in his rough, cracked hands. “Don’t worry, you’ll get your own soon,” he continued, “and they’ll make you bring it everywhere.” He rolled his eyes and jutted his elbow in my direction. “I know it seems silly. But trust me, you’ll grow to love it.”

      He looked down at his turtle and gave it a tender squeeze. Just as I was wondering if I could leave and still get my money back, the doors leading from upstairs opened and about twenty or so people streamed into the living room. I looked to Greg, who called out, “Dinnertime! Sloppy Joes tonight.”

      I thought back to my pre-treatment phone call with Nancy; apparently this counted as gourmet dining. I reluctantly followed the stream to the cafeteria, where I scooped fluorescent orange meat onto my plate. I added a little salad and then sat down at a table with Greg and a few others. “Sloppys taste a lot better with buns, you know,” he said.

      I lied and told him there were none left. I was too uncomfortable to eat, especially bread that looked like the cotton stuffing inside of furniture. Instead I stabbed at a browning piece of iceberg lettuce, zigzagging it across my plate. After dinner, Richard came over and knelt beside me with a clipboard. “You’ll be going in the blue van to the Al-Anon meeting in Bowling Green,” he said. “Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous only meets in Louisville.”

      In addition to having no idea that Twelve Step meetings would be a part of this, I was surprised that they didn’t have their own Ledge members-only meetings on site, that we’d be mingling with locals. Apparently, that was the point: to humble us, so we’d avoid feeling special and distinguishing ourselves from other addicts. I wondered why Nancy hadn’t bothered to mention any of this to me before I’d signed up.

      “What’s Al-Anon?” I asked Richard.

      “That seems right,” he said, ignoring my question as he scribbled something on his clipboard, beside my name. He then directed me to the van that was going to the community center, where the Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon meetings took place. Greg was already buckled up in the back row, and I was glad for it. He was the only person I’d spoken to so far, which made me feel disproportionately close to him. On the way to the meeting, I learned that he was a surgeon at one of South Carolina’s top hospitals. He was married to Vivian but sleeping with his intern, Jill. “The thing is,” I heard him saying in the row behind me, “I love Vivian, but she treats me like shit.”

      “Could it be because you’re fucking someone else?” I asked without turning around.

      As the van pulled up to the community center, I realized that I had goose bumps and was frantically tapping my foot. Half of us spilled out of the van and into the center, which was one big sparse room containing a gray folding table surrounded by ten folding metal chairs. A coffeemaker with a brown-streaked carafe and powdered creamer sat on an aluminum-rimmed table in the corner. When we arrived, it was mostly women, only a few men, including Greg. Once we were all seated, a woman with an authentic beehive hairdo opened the meeting, introducing herself as Bonnie. “Hi, Bonnie,” everyone echoed.

      •

      “I’m Anna,” Anna said, though I already knew her name, we’d been in treatment together for a month by then, learning why food and fullness weren’t our enemies. When I confessed to the group that I had developed feelings for the center’s nutritionist, after an all-night G-chat correspondence precipitated by her filling in the second half of a Shins lyric that I’d posted as my status, Anna approached me. “It was brave of you to admit that to everyone,” she said. She had wolf-blue eyes and golden retriever warmth. She then handed me a scrap of paper. “Here’s my number, if you ever want to talk.”

      I felt seen, in that moment. I also felt curious. I called her that weekend. “Want to meet for coffee?”

      •

      The topic at the Al-Anon meeting that night was detachment. How to detach from your alcoholic with love. From your drug addict, with love. From your personality-disordered relative, with love. As people around the room shared stories of sons’ arrests and daughters’ relapses, husband anger, parental neglect, panic crept up inside me. Those weren’t the kinds of stories I’d expected to hear, and they were resonating a little too well. I felt embarrassed by the similarities of our experiences, the way they overlapped, the banality of what had been so painful to me. I also felt an unsettling disgust with the presumption that I could relate to these people in some way, in any way at all, really. When Bonnie asked if I wanted to share, I chose to pass. “I’m just listening tonight,” I said, and a round of “glad you’re here” sounded throughout the room. The woman sitting beside me reached out and pressed her palm against the back of my hand.

      We waited in the parking lot after the meeting. Some people wandered off and smoked, others ran to the Walgreens across the street. Greg ranted to no one in particular. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that meeting was just a bunch of horny housewives who probably drove their husbands to drink.”

      He was still going on about the meeting when the van pulled up, everyone piling in with contraband sodas and a lingering smell of smoke. “They should change their statement,” Greg said. “Al-Anon: friends and family of alcoholics who wouldn’t need to drink so much if their friends and family weren’t so goddamned whiny!” He chuckled and snorted a little. I turned around and glared at him. He shut up. I then looked straight ahead, through the windshield, and smiled. He didn’t need to know that I thought he was kind of funny.

      EVERY JUNE THROUGHOUT OUR CHILDHOOD, KARIM AND I were loaded onto a plane, our mother seated between us, our suitcases stowed in the plane’s underbelly, and hauled across the Atlantic Ocean