You Exist Too Much. Zaina Arafat

Instead we watched television or read in separate rooms. When I’d ask what she felt like having for dinner she’d tell me she’d already ordered takeout for herself. “Did it occur to you that I might want something, too?” I once asked.

      “Not really.” She shrugged. “You rarely seem to want what I want.”

      Leaving when things were that bad felt irresponsible and unsettling. But at the same time, I was happy to escape, if only for a week. Anna was still asleep when I left for the airport, and I decided not to wake her. I wanted to avoid any guilting remarks about me flitting off for a week when I was moving away for good in just a few months, and why did it always seem like I was pushing her away?

      I felt increasingly uncomfortable as the plane hurtled down the runway, the unresolved tension coating my stomach. The moment we landed at LAX, I switched my phone back on and called her. She didn’t answer, so I left a voice mail, then hung up and sent her a text: You okay? An hour went by and still no response. Later that evening, I realized that I still hadn’t heard from her. I texted again. I called a second time. I kept calling, again and again. Nothing.

      “Weird,” I said to Renata. “Anna’s not answering.”

      “Maybe she’s busy,” Renata responded. “She does exist outside of your relationship, you know.”

      I forgave Renata her misplaced annoyance. She had put up with me panicking about nearly everything for years. “Your worries are like water,” she often said. “The moment one flows out, another floods in to fill the space.”

      By the next day, an amorphous ball of anxiety had formed in my stomach, made up of concern for Anna’s well-being and fear that something else was wrong. For the sake of the trip I tried not to let my worry show. Plus, I didn’t want to exhaust Renata’s patience this early on. I had other anxieties that would need to be addressed, mostly pertaining to the professor. I was still critiquing her academic analysis of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Renata kept pronouncing the title in an exaggerated French accent anytime it came up, followed by a dramatic flip of her hair. “Do you think she’s trying to tell you something? Maybe she wants you to be her Marquise de Merteuil?”

      We were packing snacks for the desert when my phone finally pinged. I jumped to check it: an email from Anna.

      As I read, relief quickly gave way to fear. “It’s a good thing I don’t trust you,” she had written. “Because if I did, I wouldn’t have had a reason to search for confirmation.”

      My stomach dropped. Her letter continued, “What I saw was worse than I expected. I feel like I’ve been living in a fantasy for years.”

      My laptop. I’d left it at home. And my password was saved. In my emails, Anna had found the proof she’d been looking for: throughout the four years we’d been together, I had actively longed for others. I’d formed relationships that resembled courtship more than friendship, some that lingered in the realm of inappropriate emotional connection, others that led to sex with strangers as a means of distraction. “Now you’ll no longer have to deal with any reality that comes with us, and you can live happily ever after with your obsessions. Though I’m amazed to see how unrealistic they’ve become. A married pregnant straight woman—you’ve really outdone yourself with this one!”

      My first concern was that Anna had written the professor from my account and said something crazy or revealing, as a means of revenge. I had enough sense to know that she wouldn’t do such a thing, and that I was incredibly selfish for worrying about myself right then. I tried desperately to recall each illicit correspondence that existed among my emails. I was almost certain there was no trace of the club encounters—they had all cropped up spontaneously, and I’d kept in touch with none of them. Still, what Anna had found was bad enough.

      “I’m devastated that you could be so careless with my heart,” she wrote, and I shuddered. It was exactly how I felt my own heart had been treated throughout my life—carelessly, callously. “I want you to really sift through your issues and face them, and feel a fraction of the torture I feel as a result of this.”

      The last line was the hardest to read, the one that made my throat burn: “Maybe one day you’ll learn you can’t treat people with such disregard. Even yourself.”

      Finally, Anna had mustered the resistance I’d been craving. It was at once frightening and attractive: never had I wanted her more. I felt my body go cold, and for a moment I thought I was going to be sick. “What’s the matter?” Renata asked.

      I handed her the phone and watched her deflate while reading the email. “Well, there you go,” she said. “Again.”

      For a moment I was pissed. She was my friend, after all, not Anna’s. Then I remembered what she’d been through with Thomas. How he’d lied to her, how she’d found out in the most humiliating way, walking in on him with his high school girlfriend. I knew I had managed to let her down, too.

      She handed back my phone. I stared at Anna’s email. I had never felt so exposed—I wanted to take back every vulnerability I’d ever shown her, every moment that I had asked for comfort. “What do I do?” I asked Renata. The question was genuine; I truly had no idea.

      “I mean, what can you do? We’re here, she’s there. And she’s seen everything.”

      I got up from the table and called Anna. It rang and rang, and still no answer. Fear soaked up every other emotion. I told Renata I needed to change my return flight and leave the next day. I had to get home and deal with this.

      “I will seriously kill you if you do that.”

      “But what if there’s still a chance to fix things?”

      “You do need to fix things,” she said. “But it’s not the relationship that’s broken.”

      I looked down at my phone and reread the email. I began typing a response. “Please,” I wrote. I didn’t know what else to say, any attempt to defend myself felt shameful and useless. “I have no idea what I’ve been doing.” I really didn’t: it was as though I’d been sleepwalking, going through the motions without any control.

      For the rest of the trip I checked my email compulsively. “I wanna throw your phone in a dune,” Renata said. In the times when we were out of range, we talked. Renata suggested that I’d set myself up to get caught. “Isn’t that essentially what you’ve been asking for, by being so reckless?”

      She had a point. Why, after all, would I leave my laptop out in the open, as though inviting Anna in? Hadn’t I wanted for things to end? I must’ve known what I was doing was wrong, that I was hurting her, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. I needed something to stop me, Renata said as we hiked, if only for a chance to redeem myself.

      But I knew that my reasons for sabotage went beyond that. Besides, this couldn’t be me, this deceitful woman I’d woken up to find. It couldn’t.

      •

      All of Anna’s stuff was gone from our apartment by the time I got back to New York. The cabinets were half empty, her closet shelves bare, the stark ceramic of the bathroom sink visible for the first time in months. I was simultaneously shocked and impressed that she’d had the strength and resolve to actually move out. I stood in the doorframe feeling alone and afraid, and dreading the days until the lease ended in August, too far away—it was only the beginning of June.

      My laptop sat inconspicuously on the kitchen table. I lifted the screen and it brightened. Anna had left it on; the browser was still open to my inbox. Now that I was alone, without Renata’s input, I reread Anna’s email. It felt even worse reading it in our apartment, imagining her sitting at the same kitchen table, the humiliation she must’ve felt. The walls were practically radiating with her hurt. I searched for the professor’s last note. I began to describe what happened, hoping that communicating my pain would somehow alleviate it. I then remembered that I’d never mentioned Anna to her, and I didn’t have the energy to do so now, to recount the entire story, especially since much of it actually involved her, though of course