Читать книгу You Exist Too Much - Zaina Arafat - Страница 17

5

IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ONE MORNING, AFTER MY ALARM had been ringing for twenty-seven minutes, my father blasted into my bedroom, grabbed the clock off the nightstand, opened the window, and hurled it into our front yard. This occurred after numerous attempts to wake me up by song; he’d float into my room in his flannel pajamas, singing “Ya madrassa, ya madrassa,” which means, “School, O school” in Arabic, or, depending on which dictionary you consult, “terrorist training camp.”

Though as an adult waking up hasn’t gotten much easier, on my first morning at the Ledge I was wide awake and at the main lodge in time for coffee. I wanted to get as much caffeine as I could. At seven thirty exactly the kitchen door opened and a bald man with bright eyes and a warm smile emerged, carrying three carafes. He put them down and then checked to make sure the sugar tray was full. I pawed through the pile of mismatched mugs, chose the tallest, and pumped the carafe until my cup was full to the brim, sitting down carefully so I wouldn’t spill.

The night before, I had stayed up late chatting with my roommate, Molly. “I’m not sure I belong here,” she’d said.

Molly was a love addict, too. Tucked into bed, her makeup still thick on her face, she told me about the meth lab she and her boyfriend ran out of their kitchen in Chattanooga. Her instincts were screaming at her to get out of the marriage and the meth, but she couldn’t bear to leave him. The thought of disappointing him was just too much. He couldn’t bear it either, and when she once attempted to leave, he threw himself in front of her moving car, breaking both of his legs and relegating her to be his caretaker. “It’s how I was raised,” she told me. “To please others. You know?”

I did know. “I think you’re in the right place,” I’d said before drifting off to sleep.

As I sat in the lodge lapping up coffee, I looked around at the posters on the walls. There was one with a gnome walking down a long fairy-tale trail. Beneath him was a quote by Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Something about it unsettled me. I figured it was supposed to make us feel better about being in Bowling Green, Kentucky, rather than elsewhere. I was thinking of the other places I could be when Greg walked into the living room carrying Why Men Love Bitches, a contraband item, as we were only supposed to be reading self-help literature that Nancy had sanctioned. His blond hair was slicked back, making it hard to tell where his forehead ended and his hairline began. He was wearing white patent-leather loafers and a T-shirt that said, “Your Village Called, They Want Their Idiot Back!” After he poured himself a cup of coffee, he sat down beside me and snapped his book against my thigh. “Hey, baby girl!” he said. “How you doin’ this morning, you sleep well?”

He smiled a big game-show-host grin. Was this an attempt to flirt? I raised an eyebrow and sneered in return. “Yo, Miami Vice,” said a guy with a lip ring, tapping his foot against Greg’s, “are those your dancin’ shoes?”

“These bad boys?” Greg said, pointing down. “They better do more than that, I paid three hundred bucks for ’em!”

The guy with the lip ring shook his head and laughed. Greg laughed along earnestly, unaware that he was being mocked. I gazed at the pine trees outside, and as the sun rose, streams of light poured in through the windows and illuminated the dust in the room. Greg looked at me and smiled again. “It’s your Higher Power saying ‘good morning,’” he said.

“Yeah, right.” I smirked. He seemed momentarily deflated. I realized I had mistaken his earnestness for sarcasm, and I immediately regretted mine.

I had breakfast; a glass of water and half a grapefruit. Afterward, I was about to step outside when I heard a cowbell ringing. Then someone called out, “Phase Two in the big room, Phase One in the small!”

Phase One. The newbies, lumped together in one group with our various addictions and afflictions. There were four of us: Greg; my roommate, Molly; another guy, named Alex; and me. I appeared to be the youngest. Following the three of them, I made my way upstairs to the small room. Richard stood in the doorway, waving us in. I chose a seat against the back wall. As Richard shut the door and walked toward the whiteboard at the front, I felt as if the room were shrinking, the walls zeroing in on me. I was terrified by the prospect of sharing anything vulnerable with these people, of being in such a confined, intimate space with them, every day for a month! I raised my hand and Richard nodded at me. I looked at Molly, then squinted at Greg. “Will the four of us be doing all of this together?” I asked. “As a group?”

•

My resistance to groups is likely a response to my culture’s fervent embrace of them, which locates value not as much in the individual as in the cohort they belong to. “Why don’t you be friends with her?” my mother would suggest, speaking of a friend’s daughter. “She has a nice crowd,” by which she meant “she has a crowd,” the distinct identities of its members less of a concern. Indeed, cliques are the norm among Arabs, but they are never easy to break into. I know—I tried, and failed. Even my cousins wouldn’t have me. After each day at the InterContinental hotel pool that summer, Reema invited Nour to sleep over, but never me. They acted as if I didn’t notice, but of course I did. Though I usually wouldn’t find out until the next morning, when I’d interrogate my mother about whether she’d seen Reema and Nour together at the hotel the night before while she dined with their mothers on the terrace. Yes, she’d respond, she’d seen them. And I would cry, because I desperately wanted to be closer to them, to stay up until dawn playing cards and watching rom-coms. But I was the American cousin, which inspired a resentment that my mother, depending on her mood, promised me was rooted in jealousy or lambasted me for, as though I had chosen to grow up in the States. Being regularly excluded, I developed a preference for solitude, one that I wasn’t so ready to exchange for the incessant company of complete strangers. I chose careers accordingly. DJing was one that worked well with my need to be alone, and also with love addiction: it limited my time with Anna and introduced me to a swathe of people who adored me, or some version of me, without expectations. With gigs on prime socializing nights I got used to skipping nights out with her. Besides, I didn’t need a partner to feel loved: I was a DJ! I was loved from a distance, the safest way to be loved.

•

“I’m afraid you don’t get much alone time here,” Richard said. “We’re modeled on a group system. So the four of you better get comfortable—you’ll be getting to know each other pretty well.”

Before I could respond, he walked over to the whiteboard and picked up a marker. He drew a rudimentary tree, and at the tips of its various branches he wrote Alcohol, Drugs, Food, Sex, Love. At the tree’s roots, designated by hyperextended squiggly lines, he wrote in big block letters: CODEPENDENCY.

“Can anyone tell me what that word means?” he asked.

I raised my hand but didn’t wait for him to call on me. “It’s an inability to be in a healthy relationship with the self.”

“Right,” he said. “How’d you know that?”

In her book, Pia Mellody had made a significant effort to distinguish codependency from love addiction: While love addicts turn to a person as a drug of choice for soothing the pain of their difficult relationships with themselves, the absence of healthy self-love is itself codependency.

“I read it somewhere.” I shrugged. “I remember things.”

“That’s one definition of it,” he conceded. “Here we like to think of it as the pain from childhood that manifests in adulthood.”

“So unless you grew up in a 1950s sitcom,” I said, “you’re codependent?”

Richard forced a laugh. “It’s true that most people have unresolved pain from childhood. But not everyone ends up self-medicating with one of these.” He ran the capped marker back over the words at the ends of the branches. “The goal is figuring out how we got from the root of the tree to the branches. From codependency to addiction.”

We began by telling our life stories. “There’s no time limit on how long you have, just however long you need to take,” Richard said as I clenched the edges of my chair. Having known these people for less than twenty-four hours, I wasn’t too enthused about hearing their entire personal histories. I assumed everyone else must’ve felt the same way, but to my surprise, they seemed engaged, leaning forward attentively to listen to one another. Though I mostly scribbled in my notebook and did equations, calculating the cost per hour of being there, I picked up bits and pieces.