Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

“They’re too squishy, and the world is too harsh.” He sits up. “Squishy Eri, and squishy Aki.” He pats my leg through the covers. “If we’d never had them, nobody could ever hurt them.”

I was expecting to be surrounded by mess, shouting, hopefully some amusement, but life, definitely, and a noisy one, which did not sound like heartbreak to me at all. But as soon as the children were born it was blindingly obvious—your heart can’t break unless it has something to love. The way you love your children, they take your heart with you everywhere they go. Suddenly you realize just how cruel, just how loud and brash and harsh and illogically cruel, the world is, and it turns out that other mother was right. When they laugh, when they cry, when they’re ill, when they grow, every moment they adore you and every step they take away from you—the whole thing is completely heartbreaking.

But I suppose that’s part of love, or young love anyway—the deep desire to roll the dice and find out, always with the absurd hope, flying like a kite, that you might just be the ones who manage to hold on to each other through it all. Once,

disturbs me to find that my children have been programmed by the Tokyo Metro system.

Part-time jobs are gold dust, and I tell Eloise she’s my fairy godmother, which she assures me is ridiculous.

It makes me wonder what I don’t know about him too, and the thought makes me feel, oddly, closer to him; it reminds me of us at the beginning, when we chose what to reveal and had the courtesy of shielding each other from things that were unpalatable, of being our best selves for the other, instead of knowing too much.

We’re adults, and we’ve built something, and we’ve both felt how precarious this life can be.