Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

But if you get to know somebody, and find out you laugh at the same things and share strange tics; if it gets so good you only need to catch his eye to know what he’s thinking, you are, it is blindingly clear, totally screwed.

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 love being able to tell him exactly what I’m thinking. Not having to put it through the good-parenting filter I use for my children, or the perpetual war communication calculations I do with Tatsu, or the edited, rose-tinted truth I feed my mother.

the way toward intimacy and closeness was to peel away the surrounding layers of crap until you could bare your soul.

Why not? What are we, apart from the stories we tell ourselves and other people?