Mary wasn’t aware of the story of my secret spot, but all the same, her rough hand would move automatically to my back. A numbness would steal through my entire body, and I’d forget the pain that Thurayya had caused. Mary would take me onto her lap; into her world; into her smell, redolent of exotic grasses, wild thyme, and olive oil soap; into her hoarse voice; into her bed, lined with cotton and wool and pictures of the saints. I would almost forget that I—the child she served, for whom she worked so hard and on whose behalf she feared—wasn’t her child. I played tricks on her when she was busy with housework, going up to her and pretending that something had stung me on the back. She’d quickly drop whatever she was doing to raise my shirt and make sure nothing was there. Then she would stretch out her fingers and begin rubbing my back with her coarse palm, not with her nails, which were cut short, as Madame Thurayya had instructed. When Mary saw that this treatment relaxed me, made me sleepy, that it gave me back my appetite, that it alleviated my depression somewhat, she began using it for my anxiety and insomnia whenever I woke up crying or refused to eat or when sleep eluded me entirely, on days when Thurayya’s persecutions became even worse.

I never opened up or expressed myself, but instead swallowed all my words and choked on them. That’s why I refused to eat, refused to speak, refused to obey. My father, the doctor, took me to pediatricians who diagnosed me with various ailments. That made Thurayya recoil even further from me, and it turned me into an even heavier burden that my father was forced to drag from clinic to clinic. They ascribed all my symptoms to varying afflictions, never realizing that almost from birth I was subject to what in an adult would have been called nervous breakdowns, some of which kept me company for years on end and then made regular return visits even after I’d managed to clear my head.

When you’re an unwanted child, you are erased, you disappear. You feel you’re nobody, nothing, and you fade away. Nothing can remove that stain from you, the essential curse, the wretchedness, unless it’s your absence, and you withdraw from life. That black hand grabs your throat, and like someone drowning, you struggle to draw air into your cells. These days, of course, plenty of people claim to have nervous breakdowns, but they don’t know what it means for your body to be paralyzed as your spirit watches from the outside, even as the two remain bound by a cord that makes the least movement or breath an excruciating enterprise. First when I was a child and then as a teenager, my breakdowns kept coming, and I taught myself how to deal with them by cutting the ties between myself and my family entirely, leaving home early each morning without a word to anyone. My mother didn’t want me, so I broke away. I lived apart from her. My soul became a balcony, suspended in the air, attached to the apartment but not really a part of its life.