A Separation

by Katie Kitamura

was no small thing, dismantling the edifice of a marriage.

The wife is always the subject of cursing,

In childhood, words are weightless—I shout I hate you and it means nothing, the same can be said for I love you—but as an adult, those very words are used with greater care, they no longer slip out of the mouth with the same ease. I do is another example, a phrase that in childhood is only the stuff of playacting, a game between children, but then grows freighted with meaning.

It was a terrible thing, to love and not know whether you were loved in return, it led to the worst sensations—jealousy, rage, self-loathing—to all these lesser states.

people say that when you are grieving, when you have experienced a profound loss, you are impaled beneath it, hardly in a condition to express your sorrow.

This was the process by which two lives were disentangled, eventually the dread and discomfort would fade and be replaced by unbroken indifference, I would see him in the street by chance, and it would be like seeing an old photograph of yourself: you recognize the image but are unable to remember quite what it was to be that person.

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.

This is one reason why you become better as you grow older, when you are young, you do not have an intimate experience of death, of loss, you do not have enough sadness in you to mourn. You need to have a great deal of sadness inside you in order to mourn for other people, and not only yourself.

it was one of the quandaries a woman sometimes faces, not just a woman, but all of us: she entrances one man without effort, a man who is undesired, who follows her around like a dog, however much he is whipped or abused, while all her efforts to attract and then ensnare another man, the truly desired man, come to naught.

Imagination, after all, costs nothing, it’s the living that is the harder part.

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.

Christopher had gone. What happened now was private to himself—as there are apartments in our own minds that we never enter without apology, we should respect the seals of others—and what was more private than one’s death, particularly when it was violent or unnatural?

I was reminded of how abrupt and unnatural death always is, at least as we experience it: always an interruption, always things that are left unfinished.

Yes, it is the most important love, the love of the mother is a given, it is taken for granted. A child is born and for the rest of his or her life the mother will love the child, without the child doing anything in particular to earn it. But the love of a wife has to be earned, to be won in the first place and then kept.

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.

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.

The emptiness of death is too hard to sustain, in the end we barely manage to do it for a day, an hour, after the death event itself.

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.

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.