Audition

by Katie Kitamura

Because of Tomas. Through him, with him, I had learned to live with greater discipline, to inhabit a certain quietude, so that I no longer fully remembered what it felt like to be so open to the world, to take such pleasure in throwing myself onto the crashing waves of other people’s temperament.

air. I remember being perfectly happy, I remember wanting nothing more.

they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.

it was something rather different, a remarkably cagey period between the two of us, when neither of us was entirely straightforward, entirely honest, about our feelings and desires, either with each other or with ourselves.

In those rituals of daily life, I committed myself to the marriage, in all its mundanity, all over again.

For so many years there had been the tacit understanding that I contained the threat to the marriage, that it was housed inside me. And for all those years I had tamped down every impulse to stray, I had lived inside a straitjacket of my own devising, and I had remained true. But in the end, he was the first to tire of the marriage, he was the first to look outside, to open the door and taste the fresh and free air. He was the first, and he was always bound to be the first, because of course I needed him, I needed Tomas, much more than he needed me, and this had always been the case, whether I was able to admit it or not. It was him, and it was always going to be him.

long periods when I did not seem to think of our relationship at all, when it was as if our relationship did not exist, it did not occupy any space in my mind. Was it normal for a mother to be so unreflective? When I thought about my relationship with Xavier, when I looked back upon it, my memory was alarmingly inconsistent and full of gaps, so that I could not really say how it had been, at various stages of his life, his childhood and adolescence. What little there was had a certain thinness, like clips spliced together and aged by way of a filter, none of it seemed like the record of events that had actually taken place.