Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

it remained the house he had spent the long years of his childhood in. That comfort was alien to me, we had moved so frequently when I was young that there was no one place I would think of as my childhood home, we were mostly arriving and then leaving, those years were all motion.

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

But I no longer believed that equanimity was either tenable or desirable. It corroded everything inside. I had never met a person with greater equanimity than the former president. But this applied to all of them—to the prosecution and the defense, to the judges and even the other interpreters. They were able to work. They had the right temperament for the job. But at what internal cost?

I thought—I want to go home. I want to be in a place that feels like home. Where that was, I did not know.