Paper Cuts
by Robert Kibble
[this is the second in the three part series–
read Half Life Connections from the beginning, here]
“Dear Ami.”
Ami hates where this is going already. Why would Zac write to her? She hasn’t received a personal letter since her mother wrote to her at university. She stares at it, imagining the content: “I’m sorry I shouted last night.” That’s what it’ll say. Then how much he loves her, how it’s easier to say it in a letter.
He’s a fool sticking with her so long. She’s a fool sticking with him. They’re not “in love”. They’re comfortable, even happy sometimes. But is this the man she’ll marry? He keeps asking about kids. He wants kids. Ami’s not so sure. Is he “the one”? There was that stupid film with Anne Hathaway where she judged by her foot lifting off the floor when they kissed. Ami’s foot doesn’t budge.
Ami has a box next to her, from her recently-dead grandfather’s attic. She’s been clearing out the house. She’s got some black-and-white photographs of unknown people, and has found a folded-up piece of paper tied with a red ribbon. A love letter, perhaps? Written from Yazuko to Coleman – Ami’s maternal grandparents – and then kept in this box for decades? Maybe written when he was away in the navy, with Yazuko’s loyalties torn?
“Coleman,” it begins. So cold. No nickname, like “smoochy” or something… There’s a flutter in her stomach – this isn’t right.
“This needs to be brief…”
Nothing is good when it needs to be brief. Ami looks at the picture of her grandmother, looking stern. Of a different age. But there had always been that beautiful “love across the continents” thing. That was unusual back then. Ami was part Japanese, and proud of it.
“…so please forgive my abruptness.”
Please forgive. Why even say that? Just get on with it.
“I have found someone else.”
Ami reads this line over and over. As if by rereading it won’t say the same thing. She looks at the photograph of Yazuko, looking every bit the woman who would always look after her husband – it didn’t fit.
“I will not be returning to America when the war ends.”
What? Why? To stay in Japan on a whim, leaving behind a young child who barely knew her? A child who would go on a pilgrimage to Japan, trying to understand. A child who never knew what her mother had done. A child who would grow up and have her own daughter – Ami – whom she would not abandon.
It was true she didn’t return. Ami grew up hating the bomb that killed her grandmother, but now has a new hatred – for that decision, even though returning then would have meant being sent to an internment camp. FDR, that great bastion of progressiveness, the only president elected four times, still put the Japanese into camps. Ami learnt about it from The Karate Kid. She liked that film. Miyako was cool.
And even after the war ended, what Japanese person would’ve wanted to come back to America? To face what? Racism? There was plenty of that. Would her grandfather have suffered too having a Japanese wife? He had a half-Japanese daughter.
“Please consider yourself freed from any obligation towards me. Yazuko.”
What kind of a parting is that? What mother could turn and say that she wouldn’t be coming back like that? No obligation. How cold was that?
Zac intrudes into her thoughts, with his letter. She reads another line, hoping for light relief from her swirling confusion.
“I said the wrong things. I’m sorry. I love you, Ami. You know that. I haven’t said it out loud, but you know. If you really don’t think this is working, that’s your decision. I think we have a future.”
Not distraction enough. Ami knew her grandmother had returned to Japan to visit family, but the war had broken out and she’d been stuck. Things changed in an instant, and people didn’t always have control. Not like Ami did now. Not like her choice whether to stay with a sap who doted on her or remain free.
“Any obligation.”
It was an odd way of putting it. “I have found someone else.” It was deliberate. An act of malice. She looks down into the box and sees more photos, one showing Yazuko and Coleman with friends. One woman has a young daughter and looks very thin. Ami turns the picture over. There’s a little cross on the back, and a date. April 1945. Did this woman die in the camps?
Ami pictures her grandmother again. Had she known? Had Coleman told her about the camps? Had she known their friend had died? What happened to the young girl? She went through the letter again. “Any obligation.” This was calculated. Ami realises she was wrong – it wasn’t malice. She pictures her grandmother, back in Japan, hearing the news. Perhaps she knew. Perhaps she knew there was a terrible wind coming.
She sees Yazuko again, not malicious, but crying. Writing a letter knowing she was separating herself from everything she loved. Making it possible for the man she loved to love again. He never did. He wrapped that letter in ribbon.
Ami wonders if Coleman had realised. The ribbon suggests he had. He certainly bore her no ill-will, although that could have been because she died so soon after.
Ami imagines writing a letter sacrificing everything you love for the sake of everything you love.
Spending your last days alone, knowing you would never see your family again.
Ami pictures her grandmother, writing the words ending her family, for her at least. Loneliness. Separation. Sorrow.
Ami looks back at Zac’s letter.
She likes Zac. A lot. He’s not “the one”. He’s not everything she’s wants in life. He’d be a compromise. Yazuko and Coleman might have been, too. But Ami likes Zac. Maybe she even loves him. They were happy. Mostly.
Maybe that happiness, that connection, that compromise, that link to another human being, so fragile and precarious – maybe that’s what love is.
Ami picks up the phone.
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