Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

It was naive of me, to think that expressing your distaste for something means you can resist all the forces of family and society that propel you toward it.

I could have done it too: gone on indefinitely without deciding to poise a wrecking ball above everything my life is made of. There’s no defining reason for it in the creaks and cracks of my average housewife life. But then I met Kiyoshi. He’s the reason.

Sometimes the days last forever, and still the weeks and months and years go whizzing unstoppably by.

Parenting is savage—there is no other activity on earth that you could get up to do four times a night for two years straight, and at the end of it be merely in the running for mediocre.

Pregnancy made me feel like I was a walking biology experiment—my main thought throughout labor was massive relief that this whole slightly revolting part of my life would be over soon and I could just be a normal human with children, not a semi-invalid with too many hospital appointments and carte blanche for medical professionals to ask inappropriate questions.

I suppose it’s unsurprising that one might question things sometimes, being in a state of indentured servitude to two small psychopaths.

My children. My life’s work, my greatest loves, orchestrators of total psychological trauma and everyday destruction.

“Good morning,” he said cheerily. “Did you sleep well? I was wondering if I could take you out to dinner this evening.” He was basically a Care Bear trapped in the body of an underwear model. I was confused by him for months. Why was he so bad at flirting? Why did he do the things he said he was going to? Why was he so damn happy all the time? What was I missing?

I’m not stupid enough to think that if life throws you someone that good and you let him pass you by, it’s going to let you hit the jackpot again.

Is it normal to fluctuate so quickly between feeling tender toward your husband and fervently wishing him a violent death?

Having a functional marriage is easy, it turns out. “Have a lovely day!” I call after him as he leaves. You just have to pretend you’re in an advertisement. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before.

It’s hard to remember who you are without people who know you that way.

Some people, surely, are unacceptable, and the makers of the recordings don’t know if I’m one of those people or not. How do they know if I phone my mother regularly, or separate my recycling, or keep my terrace free of furniture that could fly away in a typhoon, or tell the truth? You can accept yourself, here, but only if you’re fulfilling your obligation to society.

Having a secret makes me feel like nobody owns me, and that any opinion of me could always be inaccurate; no one has the whole picture, so it’s like trying to judge somebody’s appearance from a shard of broken mirror.

What are we, apart from the stories we tell ourselves and other people?

Now, when I remember what I wanted before I met Kiyoshi, I think it was just to start over, to do it all again for the first time, or maybe not do it at all. To have a clean slate. To be somebody else. But then there would be no Aki, no Eri, and life doesn’t work like that, does it? So I’m not leaving Tatsu for Kiyoshi, because that might be love, maybe, but it isn’t happiness, not for me or for anybody else.

Sayuri is a lowly life-form who isn’t worth another glance, and that her best course of action is to ignore her completely and find someone different to hang out with. I tell her how much better it is to be laughed at by a bunch of morons than to somehow find yourself in a gang with a bunch of morons, laughing at nothing.

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.