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 she had no idea. I stopped midsentence, an emptiness swelling inside me. For the first time in a while, the thought of the professor didn’t send me reeling into fantasies. Without the security of a relationship, longing felt less safe. It felt lonely.
As I sat alone in my apartment, I thought back to that night at the restaurant in SoHo, the last time I’d seen or spoken to my mother, by then nearly a month earlier. I’d trailed behind her all the way to the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Once I caught up to her, she stuck out her hand to hail a taxi. One pulled over immediately. She opened the door, and before stepping in she turned to me, her top lip resting on her lower lip in that furious non-smile. “I don’t care what you choose to do anymore,” she said, and I crumbled. I needed her to care. Worse than anger was indifference: her approval was my compass, even when that meant resisting it. She then shot me a piercing look before shutting the cab door. “Good luck finding someone to love you like I did.”
I WAS FOUR WHEN THE FIRST INTIFADA BEGAN. AS A FAMILY, we would gather around the box-shaped TV in our wood-paneled basement in the D.C. suburbs and watch the seven o’clock news. I would spread out on the floor, taking in scenes of distant carnage while laying my Barbies atop one another in unintentional 69 positions. Karim would spring up and down in his bouncy chair. My father would pour some of the newly introduced Cool Ranch Doritos into one ceramic bowl and medium-spicy Old El Paso salsa into another. He’d then empty an already-cold Heineken bottle into a frosted pilsner glass from the freezer. Often I’d go searching for chocolate chip ice cream and instead find mulukhiya, a vegetable you could only ever find in Middle Eastern supermarkets, along with the frosted glasses on the freezer shelves. My mother was the only one who kept her eyes glued to the television, the distance from her homeland enhancing her longing and attachment as she felt it slip away.
On the television screen, scenes appeared from Nablus of coffins shrouded in Palestinian flags. Young men in stonewashed jeans and bandanas peeking out from behind graffitied walls and stacks of flaming tires, throwing a seemingly endless supply of stones. Israeli soldiers in tan uniforms and laced-up combat boots pacing around checkpoints with machine guns, chewing gum and looking both vigilant and bored. These were my first images of the conflict that shattered our homeland and scattered my family. Terms like civilian casualties and Molotov cocktails and cease-fire, later replaced by negotiations and peace talks and Camp David, resounded in the Peter Jennings voiceovers as the footage of violence played on screen. We watched at a cool remove while enjoying the comforts of our American suburb, seemingly untouched, oblivious of the underlying trauma.
“YOUR LAST STOP BEFORE HEALING.” THE WORDS WERE displayed in bubbly cursive across the Ledge’s homepage. I’d stumbled upon the website after a semi-targeted search with the words destructive, relationships, help.
I was mildly put off by the fatalistic tagline, but I was also desperate. The past week alone in the apartment had felt like a year. The days I’d tried to spend writing dragged on with no productivity. I was constantly aware of Anna’s absence, each time I sat down on the couch and she wasn’t on the other end, or ate takeout for one at the kitchen table, or when I crawled into bed at night, now at a reasonable hour, since I no longer DJed. I could never fall asleep, so instead I’d watch reruns of shows I’d already seen dozens of times. Anything that entailed minimal thinking. I couldn’t resist reading through the emails she had found, cowering in embarrassment, imagining her reading them. Soon I began taking pills to numb the pain—I’d gotten the number for a notoriously irresponsible psychiatrist whose contact info had made the rounds among my coworkers at the club. He put me on a cycle of amphetamines
