Fault Lines

After all the years I've spent with him not seeing me, I don't see him anymore either. We exist like two blind fish, sliding past each other cordially in our parallel universes.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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. The whole task was far beyond anything I was capable of, and the only possible outcome was failure of the most heartbreaking kind.

Having a secret makes me feel like nobody owns me.

I love beautiful things, beautiful people, the magnetism of someone you can't take your eyes off of.

There are thirty-seven million of us in Tokyo alone-it has the effect of making it damn clear just how unimportant you are. Which is heartbreaking or relaxing, depending on how you look at it.

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

If I’d had a career, I could change jobs, apply for a promotion, do something. If I’d stayed in New York, I could have had it all, couldn’t I? But I am a Japanese Housewife, a proper, old-school job for life, and you only get to choose your colleague once.

that might be love, maybe, but it isn't happiness

Therapy isn’t really a thing in Tokyo; you do what you do, and if you really can’t take it anymore, you take the honorable way out and leave your shoes neatly paired at the edge of the bridge when you go.

But I, unfortunately, have never been one for acting logically. I'd say my true decision-making process mirrors that of an insane dog following his balls. I just happen to be fortunate enough to be sufficiently Japanese that the need to maintain appearances puts a tidy veneer on my animal instincts.

I’m in a cage without bars and I’m screaming but nobody can hear. I’m not even middle-aged yet and he’s faded me into the background.

Brunch is definitely my favorite meal of the day; its optimism and energy, the wholesome anticipation of the sunny day ahead. It feels like a cheerful resolution, weekly fuel for a new beginning.

Keeping secrets makes me feel safe. 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.

He rolls over again, still smiling. It’s the most disturbed I’ve felt in months.

He manages to make it sound sarcastic without inflecting it at all, so it'd be impossible to prove in a court of law.

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

Sometimes it felt like the part of me that my mother knew disappeared when she did. Because there wasn’t anyone else who saw it, it just faded away.

Therapy isn't really a thing In Tokyo; you do what you do, and if you really can't take it anymore, you take the honorable way out and leave your shoes neatly paired at the edge of the bridge when you go.

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.

I look nearly the same as I do now, just happier. What an unforgivable thing to say, when my life now is the way it is. Maybe not happier exactly, just as if my edges haven’t been so finely polished. Less demure, less taut. Freer.

Sometimes when he looks at me, I wonder if he can see where I've been, if he knows what I've felt. It makes me wonder what I don't know about him, too, and the thought makes me feel, oddly, closer to him; it reminds me of us at the beginning, when we chose what to reveal and had the courtesy of shielding each other from things that were unpalatable, of being our best selves for the other, instead of knowing too much.

Perhaps my failure to fight for the music means I’ve forfeited the right to say I miss it, to claim that I ever loved it or that I wish things had turned out differently. But I do still feel all those things. I guess it was a divorce like any other.

Cassie and her friends paid not the slightest attention to mistakes I made, in language or social niceties, and like the child of benignly neglectful parents, it didn’t take long for me to grow in confidence.