Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

I felt a throb—not of envy, perhaps of admiration, although the two are not unrelated.

In the Court, what was at stake was nothing less than the suffering of thousands of people, and in suffering there could be no question of pretense.

That was, I thought, the prospect offered by a new relationship, the opportunity to be someone other than yourself.

The thought was disquieting—that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives.

I had been complicit in my own erasure.

He is petty and vain but he understands the depths of human behavior. The places where ordinary people do not go. That gives him a great deal of power, even when he is confined to a cell.

I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness.