A Separation

by Katie Kitamura

It was only on the shores of infidelity that they achieved a little privacy, a little inner life, it was only in the domain of their faithlessness that they became, once again, strangers to their wives, capable of anything.

Harsh.

I remembered being surprised by the power of the ritual, the ceremonial act of speaking these words, which took on a deep and almost maniac significance. It suddenly made sense that these words—I do—would be paired with the archaic and unreasonable phrase until death do us part, which was morbid and apparently out of place in what was meant to be a joyful occasion, but which nonetheless served a clear purpose: to remind the participants of the crazed wager they were making in this act, this act being marriage.

The task of a translator is a strange one. People are prone to saying that a successful translation doesn’t feel like a translation at all, as if the translator’s ultimate task is to be invisible. Perhaps that is true. Translation is not unlike an act of channeling, you write and you do not write the words.

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.

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.

every village had a few mourners—weepers or wailers, as they were sometimes called—women who performed the funeral dirge at a village burial. What intrigued him about the practice was its externalization of grief: the fact that a body other than the body of the bereaved expressed its woe. Literally an out-of-body experience, he had said. You, the bereaved, are completely liberated from the need to emote. All the pressures of the funeral, the expectation that you will perform your grief for the assembled crowd—imagine

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.

I made this odd choice of word, arrangement, as though it were a euphemism for something untoward—

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Once you begin to pick at the seams, all deaths are unresolved

those final moments will have been intimate, even if the precise nature of that intimacy diverges from what we usually think of when we hear and use the word—the

Sequel hook