You Exist Too Much. Zaina Arafat

and I felt I was choking. Maybe it was the subtext, the one my shattered ego invented, that taunted, I have what you don’t have. You pathetic thing, don’t you see I’m so much more than you?

      I’d heard those words before. But I knew the professor would never think such mean-spirited thoughts, even if I chose to hear them. It was shameful to expect her to care about me enough to condescend.

      I called Renata, my go-to support for this sort of thing, forgetting that she was in an especially self-righteous, not-taking-any-shit mood, as her own relationship was faltering. She and Thomas, her boyfriend of five years, were on break, his choice, which meant all of her frustration with him got transposed onto me. We were planning a trip to Joshua Tree at the end of May to celebrate her graduation from med school, a trip that was also partly intended to get her mind off Thomas while he “mulled things over” and decided if he wanted to commit. Though everyone else advised her to move on—it was their second break, the first time came after he’d slept with someone else—I’d told her he was worth waiting for. Maybe I was overcompensating for how our friendship had begun: with an unwanted advance and subsequent rejection. But in truth, I’d been hearing about Thomas since college, his Sigma Chi days. I knew that she had stuck with him through much worse.

      Fed up with the professor and her precursors, Renata sighed into the phone when I gave her the update. “Unbelievable,” she said. “How dare she get pregnant by her husband without asking you!”

      I hung up immediately—it wasn’t the time for sarcasm. I was experiencing the same pain I’d felt at the end of three years with Kate. As I lay in bed feeling shattered, my phone buzzed with a call from Anna. “Oh good,” she said, “you’re awake.”

      It was two in the afternoon. Her passive aggression seethed. She was growing tired of my “profession.” Being a DJ entailed sleeping until some disconcerting hour of the day, drinking my first coffee while everyone else was enjoying happy hour cocktails, and then leaving for work as Anna returned home for the evening. It also entailed an unexpected loneliness, one that tugged at me like a dog that needed to be fed. On the early-morning F train from the Lower East Side back to South Slope, I’d scroll through pictures of friends clustered together in both familiar and exotic locations, announcements of new relationships and engagements. I craved a normal social life, a normal life, or at least a job that didn’t completely preclude me from having one.

      But the sting of alienation was outweighed by the ecstasy of performance, its unrelenting command of attention. What I enjoyed most about spinning records was the feeling of being in control, of being responsible for everyone’s good time. Me, and alcohol. I loved keeping the crowd on the verge: fading the bass in and out, speeding up the rhythm and then slowing down just before the crescendo, saving the explosive tracks until the very end. Sometimes, I would catch eyes with someone—woman, man, I was open to either—and we would chat after the set, before heading to the back room for a hurried and furtive encounter that was at once empowering and exhilarating. In the time that each lasted, which varied in proportion to the amount of liquor consumed, my mind would have respite from both Anna and from the professor, or whomever it was that particular season. I’d emerge afterward and return to the booth feeling pleased with myself, prideful if not actually confident, and at the very least soothed, the obsessive thoughts momentarily suppressed, with a sneaking suspicion that there was more to me than this.

      I tried to keep these sessions minimally invasive, so that I could emerge from them unruffled and return home undetected. But there were occasional slips. “You smell like sex,” Anna said one night when I crept into bed at four a.m., too tired to shower. My stomach flipped. I laughed off her comment and blamed it on an especially packed and sweaty night at the club. She appeared convinced at the time, or at least temporarily placated.

      “Want to meet for lunch?” Anna asked.

      We met at a diner near our apartment, a well-lit place that was always empty yet managed to stay in business. We sat across from each other in sea-foam vinyl seats. “You seem off,” she said. Melted cheese dripped from her panini. “Is something going on?”

      I looked up at the ceiling lamp suspended above us. I wanted to tell her the truth, so she would know what I was feeling, in the hope that she would comfort me, or berate me, or leave me. That way I could at least transfer my pain onto something that made sense, something real. After all, the professor did seem fabricated. Perhaps, to the extent that I’d cobbled together the pieces I had, she was. Though like the “Orient,” I chose to believe she was an idea with some corresponding reality; she was more than simulacra.

      I rushed to think of a response that wouldn’t betray my heartache. “I looked up flights,” I said. “Visiting next year is going to get pricey.”

      We hadn’t yet discussed how our relationship would survive my move to the Midwest. When my acceptance letter arrived, Anna had panicked and offered to transfer out of Columbia Law to come along. I couldn’t let her uproot her entire life, I’d told her, and give up such a great opportunity. But more than that, I knew: grad school offered a natural and guided transition out, less traumatic than a breakup, smoothly delivering me into a new life.

      “Yes, I’m aware that flying costs money,” she said. My once-endearing naiveté had become annoying. “I’m surprised you’ve only now realized this.”

      “I’m just worried,” I said. “I’m thinking of not going. I’m not sure we can afford a long-distance relationship.”

      “Is this a nutritionist situation?” she asked.

      “What? I haven’t thought about her since—”

      “Not her specifically,” Anna clarified. “I mean, are you obsessed with someone new?”

      “Are you being serious?”

      “Really, I’m asking. You sound completely irrational right now, so it would make sense.”

      “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

      “Because if you are, I hope you’ve learned by now that those people aren’t real? And that they’ll never love you back?”

      I closed my eyes and waited for the surge of anger to subside. She had no idea what the professor and I shared, how intense our connection was, that she could never compete. I took a deep breath before responding. “I obviously know that,” I said. “I’m not delusional. I wouldn’t jeopardize what we have for someone I hardly know.”

      And yet there I was, less than a month later, ready to do just that for a married woman approaching her third trimester.

      “Well, then I’m sure we would find a way to work around the distance,” she said, sounding at once sad and hopeful. “I could borrow mileage from my parents or something. Maybe I’ll find a job out there.” She smiled, touching her fingers to mine. “We could live in a little farmhouse.”

      Where do you live? I was typing out directions when it dawned on me. The professor was just being practical. Considerate, at best. Where do you live? as in, “How can we choose a coffee shop that’s convenient for both of us?” I nearly laughed out loud; she had no idea the distance I would’ve traveled for her. That I would risk an actual relationship for just the idea of her.

      “Next to the Pavilion Theater,” I responded, adding, “the corner of Thirteenth and Eighth,” just in case. Even though I was ambivalent—my conscience was finally kicking in this time—I was still hopeful.

      •

      A week later, I went by the club to pick up my final paycheck. The owner was sitting at the bar with a notebook and calculator, drinking coffee and filling out the ledger with numbers from the night before. “So you’re on to better things,” he said. “Probably for the best. Stay in this job too long and it’ll kill you.”

      “It already has,” I called out as the door swung shut behind me, the check clenched between my fingers.

      The next morning, a day after her med school graduation, Renata and I flew to California for our Joshua Tree trip. We would stay