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.

In that insane maternal way, I loved him so much, so quickly, that I didn’t know what to do. It was immediately, blindingly obvious that there was nowhere near enough time in all my life and in all the world to give both him and his sister everything they needed and that I wanted to give them.

I read somewhere that the twenty identifiable traits on the Hare psychopathy checklist apparently don’t count in children, since they tend to display all of them. These include poor behavioral controls, irresponsibility, superficial charm, parasitic lifestyle, need for stimulation, lack of realistic long-term goals, and impulsivity. I suppose it’s unsurprising that one might question things sometimes, being in a state of indentured servitude to two small psychopaths.

until I am nothing but my sight and hearing and have no thoughts at all. Tokyo, if it doesn’t provide an answer to my angst, at least has the effect of making me forget the question.

I can’t believe I ever even whispered anything to myself about loneliness, when this is the city I’ve been living in all this time.

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.

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.