A Separation

by Katie Kitamura

Every romance requires a backdrop and an audience, even—or perhaps especially—the genuine ones, romance is not something that a couple can be expected to conjure by themselves, you and another, the two of you together, not just once but again and again, love in general is fortified by its context, nourished by the gaze of others.

In the end, what is a relationship but two people, and between two people there will always be room for surprises and misapprehensions, things that cannot be explained. Perhaps another way of putting it is that between two people, there will always be room for failures of imagination.

Experience accumulated in haphazard places, the wrong bits of knowledge residing with the wrong parties.

People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment, there were plenty of people who did not marry the person they hoped to marry, much less live the life they hoped to live, other people invented new dreams to replace the old ones, finding fresh reasons for discontent.

Charm is not universal, desire is too often unreciprocated, it gathers and pools in the wrong places, slowly becoming toxic.

This had been exacerbated by the times we lived in, I thought as I observed his deepening color, the age of Google searches and social media profiles, how much of our behavior is regulated by disavowed knowledge?

For a moment, as I sat across the table from this strange woman, that mutual failure was like a bond that remained between Christopher and me, despite his absence and the vast distance between us, in the end we had experienced our mortality together.

Once a woman is behaving in a way that is other to herself, once she is acting in a manner out of the ordinary, unlikely things become possible, and that is half the task of seduction.

when you are infatuated even speaking the name of the loved one is excitement enough.

For him, perhaps, the ring served to give him a longer leash, it was more difficult to make demands of a married man, however far things went, he could always say, You knew from the start that I was married, you knew what you were getting into, it was plain as the ring on my finger. Perhaps each time he set out to roam—and I knew there had been plenty such times, over the course of our short marriage—he had dug out his wedding ring, in order to feel more free.

I had heard such stories, which in the end were stories about a single realization, the understanding that you had never fulfilled or even addressed the secret desire, the most vividly imagined fantasies, of your partner. That you had never been, on some level, what he or she had been looking for, your partner’s mind always elsewhere or making do, something that cast the record of your sexual encounters into a paltry and humiliating light, he had always been trying not to see you, not as you actually were.

The effect was not a new candidness or verisimilitude to the photographs that proliferated—on our phones, computers, on the Internet—but rather the opposite: the artifice of photography had infiltrated our daily lives. We pose all the time, even when we are not being photographed at all.

But that was not a question they could understand, for Isabella and Mark the course they would follow was clearly demarcated, painful as it was, grief had a familiar path, it was easy to believe in the specificity of one’s grief but in the end it was a universal condition, there was nothing unique about sorrow.

For the first time, I was conscious of being widowed, of lacking the protection of a man, it was an entirely atavistic sensation. Here in the lobby of this police station in Greece, I suddenly felt extraneous to the workings of the world, which is to say the world of men, I had grown invisible, standing at the threshold of that door.

The figure that beckons from a previous life—particularly when that life is genuinely good and gone, when it is not a question of real options, a marriage to be repaired, a life to be restored, either right or left, yes or no—can be uncannily persuasive. There is a reason why the living are haunted by the dead, the living cannot haunt the living in the same way. When it is a question of joining the living, you are reminded of all the reasons why you would rather not (or in most cases, as was the case with Christopher and me, you hardly need the reminder). But with the dead, who are sealed off in a separate realm, it is different.

There was something self-serving not only in Isabella’s grief, but in all grief, which in the end concerns itself not with the dead, but with those who are left behind. An act of consignment occurs: the dead became fixed, their internal lives were no longer the fathomless and unsolvable mystery they might once have been, on some level their secrets no longer of interest. It was easier to mourn a known quantity than an unknown one. For the sake of convenience we believed in the totality of our knowledge, we even protected that illusion. At a certain point, if we were to encounter a diary with the record of the dead one’s innermost thoughts we would refrain, most of us would not open the book but would return it to its resting place undisturbed, even the sight of it would be horrifying. In this way, I thought, we make ghosts of the dead.

How many times are we offered the opportunity to rewrite the past and therefore the future, to reconfigure our present personas—a widow rather than a divorcée, faithful rather than faithless? The past is subject to all kinds of revision, it is hardly a stable field, and every alteration in the past dictates an alteration in the future. Even a change in our conception of the past can result in a different future, different to the one we planned.