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Back You Exist Too Much Save as PDF
Chapters (23)
  1. Title Page
  2. Dedication
  3. Chapter 1
  4. Chapter 2
  5. Chapter 3
  6. Chapter 4
  7. Chapter 5
  8. Chapter 6
  9. Chapter 7
  10. Chapter 8
  11. Chapter 9
  12. Chapter 10
  13. Chapter 11
  14. Chapter 12
  15. Chapter 13
  16. Chapter 14
  17. Chapter 15
  18. Chapter 16
  19. Chapter 17
  20. Chapter 18
  21. Chapter 19
  22. Acknowledgments
  23. About the Author

I imagined her sitting at an empty table in a model home kitchen, her business cards beside her in an untouched stack, waiting for someone to show up. I thought about the other real estate agents at the firm with perfect English, who continued to secure clients despite the recession. I thought of the bills that arrived at her one-bedroom apartment, now solely her responsibility. She wasn’t supposed to be paying bills alone. Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way for Laila Abu Sa’ab, but she had chosen the wrong marriage and the wrong life. And though she resented me because of it—I was, by default, the wrong daughter—I also understood. I had come from my mother, I had lived inside her, but I was not of her. I was not an Abu Sa’ab, a wedge driven even deeper after she divorced my father and dropped her married name entirely. After that I was a foreigner, an unfamiliar thing, other. I would never belong to her again, though I desperately wanted to. No matter how hard I tried I would never attain the status of being hers. It would always remain just beyond my reach.

•

My words hung in the air like laundry on a clothesline. Charlotte, I’m struggling with an attraction to you. They repeated themselves over and over again in my head. “Can I respond?” Charlotte asked. “Or would you rather I didn’t?”

“No,” I said. “I want you to.”

Charlotte took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t feel violated,” she said. “I think it makes sense that you feel the way you do. I’m unattainable to you. I exist only in possibility. And that’s intoxicating.”

She looked nonplussed, unfazed by my confession. I suppose I wasn’t the first. “Plus, I’m giving you all this positive attention, all this acknowledgment and approval.” She said what didn’t need to be said, because by then everyone in that room already knew it, everyone but me. Her response seemed somehow reductive, as if she’d taken everything and plugged it into a simple formula: Acknowledgment + Approval – Mother’s Unconditional Love = Attraction. Good luck finding someone to love you like I did.

Finally, I was able to lift my head and look at Charlotte. My eyes pooled as I smiled stupidly and hoped no drops would escape.

Chapter 13

13

I EVENTUALLY STOPPED GOING TO THE TWELVE STEP meetings. They had gotten redundant—same people, same obsessions, same neglectful spouses and reckless children—and had reached the point of diminishing returns. Instead I found a coffee shop that I liked near the clubhouse, and after the van would turn the corner and everyone had gone inside, I would linger behind. One day Greg lingered, too. He spotted me heading off in the opposite direction and called out, “Hey, lady, where ya goin’?”