Audition

by Katie Kitamura

More and more often, I was surprised by the person in the mirror, it was not the lines at my mouth or the hollowness around my eyes, it was the lag in recognition that was the most troubling, the brief moment when I looked in the mirror and did not know who I was.

It wasn’t a façade or a pretense that suddenly fell away—our marriage was much more than mere surface or appearance—it was the substance of our relationship itself, guarded by a shared reality, that changed. You pull at the ropes tied to the statue, you pull and nothing happens, and then you pull and you pull again and the whole thing topples over.

This was undoubtedly because, for the first time in many years, I saw our marriage for what it really was, something fragile that could still be tarnished or lost.

People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, 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.

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.

I looked across at Tomas and I knew he was not convinced, that some part of him wished to stay inside the performance, inside the fantasy, I could see the thought moving through his head and nearly settling, what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?

We had been playing parts, and for a period—for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person—the mechanism had held. But the deeper the complicity, and the longer it is sustained, the less give there is, the more binding and unforgiving the contract, and in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse.

Can things be unsaid and undone, can the clock run both ways, backward and forward, can the story unspool in both directions?

Always to be seen, in those days it was almost an end in itself, because it was in being seen that I could say for certain that I existed, that my limbs were real as I touched them, that my being was intact as it peered out into the world. A stay against the turbulence within me—that was, perhaps, the purpose of all this.