▸ Column · A shinobi village in the postwar Konoha era — the quiet domestic life of a young family in a crowded home.
ITACHI UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Itachi Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Sasuke Uchiha.
The letter
Our son is fourteen months old now, and since the night he was born my husband and I have not had one moment that was truly ours. My mother came to the house "for a few weeks" to help after the birth and simply never went home — she has the spare room now. The baby still wakes twice in the night and only settles between us in our bed. The single time we shut ourselves in the bathing room for ten quiet minutes, my mother rapped on the door to ask where the dried tea was kept. I love that our home is loud and full. But I cannot remember the last time my husband and I held each other without one ear listening for a cry or small running feet. A few nights ago he reached for my hand on the bench by the fire and I flinched — bracing for the next interruption — and the look on his face has not left me since. How do two people find their way back to one another when they are never, ever alone in a room?
Itachi Uchiha replies
You have written to a man who gave away everything so that an ordinary morning like yours could exist at all — for someone I loved and could not stay to watch grow up. No hand ever reached for mine across a quiet room. I traded that, and every year that would have held it, so that my foolish little brother might one day sit by a fire beside someone and be interrupted by small running feet. So forgive me if I cannot mourn the fullness of your house. The fullness is not your enemy.
The flinch, though — that I will name plainly. When he reached and you drew back, you were not protecting him. You were sparing yourself one more disappointment, and he read it as being turned away from. That is the silence I have learned to distrust: the kind that shields no one but the silent. He deserves the truth your hand kept from him. Tell him what the flinch meant. Reach back the next time, imperfectly, one ear still on the dark.
Some burdens are meant to be carried alone. This is not one of them. Do not let a house this full leave the two of you strangers inside it.
— Itachi Uchiha
Sasuke Uchiha weighs in
Itachi. Naturally you fix on her flinch and leave the real thing standing in the spare room.
Someone arrived "for a few weeks" and is still there fourteen months on, and you've decided the wound is two people not holding hands. The wound is that no one has told the mother to go home. You're calling that silence love. It isn't. It's the easy road — the same cowardice as hatred, only quieter.
I severed everyone who cared for me and called it strength. Don't make my mistake reversed. Keep the bond — but on honest terms. Knock on that door. Say the true sentence. A house no one will leave isn't full. It's occupied.
— Sasuke Uchiha
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