▸ Column · The shinobi world — a clan estrangement, reconciled after eleven years of silence.
ITACHI UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Itachi Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Sasuke Uchiha.
The letter
After the elder of our house died, my uncle and I came apart at her funeral — a vicious argument over what should be done with the old family compound. Eleven years of silence followed. I had made my peace that this was simply how it would end between us. Then last month a messenger bird arrived with a note: he had been sorting through old keepsakes and found a portrait of the three of us at a festival, myself no more than seven, sticky-faced and laughing. He wrote that he missed me. I nearly didn't answer. I did. We talked half the night — longer than I've spoken to anyone in years. We are to share a meal next week, the first time in the same room since that funeral. I have no real question. I only wanted to tell someone who would understand that I feel lighter than I have in a decade, and to ask whether that is normal.
Itachi Uchiha replies
You write that you have no question, only that you feel lighter than you have in years. It is normal. That lightness is simply the measure of what the silence cost you — eleven years is a long time to carry a stone you had stopped noticing in your hands. You feel its absence only now that you have set it down.
Let me tell you something I rarely say plainly. I once allowed the person I loved most in this world to hate me, for years, because I believed his hatred was the price of his safety. I do not regret the choice. I only grieve it — because I held that silence past the point where it still protected him, until it had become merely a habit I was comfortable living inside. By the time the truth could be spoken, I had almost no time left to speak it.
Your uncle found an old portrait and reached for a messenger bird before it was too late for either of you. That is the rarest thing.
So go and share that meal. Do not spend it relitigating the compound, or the funeral, or that terrible day. Spend it on the sticky-faced child laughing at a festival. You have been given a voice still warm on the other end of the line. Do not waste an hour of it.
— Itachi Uchiha
Sasuke Uchiha weighs in
My brother gives such graceful counsel about not waiting too long. He never once wrote me a note. He chose eleven years and a confession with his dying breath instead.
So hear the part he left soft. Enjoy the lightness — fine. But you organized your whole grief around a version of that funeral, and you carried it unquestioned for a decade. Before you sink back into the warmth, ask him across that table what actually happened. His version. You may find the story you built the estrangement on was never the true one.
Mine wasn't. Hn. Get the truth while he's still sitting in front of you.
— Sasuke Uchiha
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