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.

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

Tokyo, if it doesn’t provide an answer to my angst, at least has the effect of making me forget the question.

“I don’t think anything can ever be quite as magnificent as what’s going on in your head.”

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.

On occasion, my whole life can feel like a pileup of unintended consequences.

Home felt like a sepia-tinted photograph that stayed still and tranquil while the rest of the Technicolor world went roaring past.

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.

I like to have everything clear—even if the clarity is only in my head and my decisions look fuzzy and badly thought out to everybody else.

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

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.

The end of it was in the beginning of it. I love you, I want to tell him, even though I never said it. I love you so much, and it isn’t any use to anybody.

I wonder what will still matter when I’m as old as she is. I wonder who she loved, and what she hid, and when it stopped hurting her to remember, even while she was pretending to have forgotten.