Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

But this. He’s made me invisible. With all the options I had, I chose him, chose him for life, for living, and he’s frozen me out into an existence that isn’t living at all. I’m in a cage without bars and I’m screaming but nobody can hear.

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

Hajimemashite. Let us begin.

I’ll tell you a couple of things about that first night that I knew, really, but pretended I didn’t. The way he was the first person in years who thought about the answers to the questions I asked him and looked right at me when he replied. And the way I knew exactly where in my chest my heart was, every time he said my name.

The grimness of death shocks me like a newly discovered horror every time I brush up against it, like the fresh confusion of a goldfish every time it reaches the edge of its bowl. It’s only marginally easier now than it was back then to resist spending all my time and energy trying to find chinks in its armor, a hidden clause in its finality. I really wish my dad wasn’t dead.

I guess that, like with so many other things, I just didn’t count on the fact that opening one door would mean closing another one so firmly.

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

Maybe in all those years of happy marriage, Tatsu thought that Nice Wife Mizuki was the Real Me and was disappointed when the fault lines started to appear.

I know all too well that I’m a flimsy construct, a flamboyant play set shot through with exaggerations and inconsistencies and secret compartments full of unsavory surprises. I made myself that way.

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.