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.

the matter was a modern-day blood feud, the livestock and the fires were simply the latest iteration of something that renewed itself every year. The way the earth does, he said, and will do again after the fires—with spring there will come a new feud, about something else but really it is the same thing,

He knew what he wanted, it was not even necessarily out of reach, although persuading the unwilling into love was a hazardous endeavor, and one that only rarely succeeded. Unfortunately, it is difficult to convince someone that they need something they cannot see the purpose of.

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.

how much of our behavior is regulated by disavowed knowledge?

Or perhaps Maria had told Stefano, although Maria did not know everything about Christopher, she did not know, for example, that the absent husband was soon to be an ex-husband. Would she have been relieved, had she known it? Would she have been made hopeful, to learn that I had come to Gerolimenas to ask for a divorce, that I was cutting this man, essentially a philanderer, free? Would that have led her to imagine a future, marriage, a life together, with Christopher? Imagination, after all, costs nothing, it’s the living that is the harder part.