Divorce
Uploaded by xsparklyvix on Sep 06, 2005
Aberration
I was 10 when it first started. At the beginning, it was just little things. The odd argument now and then, Over trivial things such as the newspapers and holidays. Soon it started to develop into an everyday thing. Eventually they became part of everyday life.
It was June when I realised they became normality. He went away for a few weeks and suddenly the house became silent. Dinner no longer became a chore and I no longer sat and dreamed that everything was ‘fine’ and what was happening before me was happening to someone else. A girl far away from that dinner table, Somebody else’s life not mine. Everybody thought I had a perfect family life, Nobody imagined my aberration. I kept it stored away, A guilty secret that I tried not to think about.
The weeks passed in a blur and eventually he returned and once again it was the same as usual. The same argument three times in an evening but each time seemed to get that little bit worse.
I was still delusional and never told anyone about my secret even when the letter came. It was September, four years after it started when it arrived on the doorstep. She’d gone away leaving us to deal with the remains. He didn’t argue, He realised there was an end in the horizon, everyone did. Everyone except me. Even when we walked around the new house that very afternoon, saw our furniture and our old suitcases in the hall it was still a figment of my imagination, something I envisaged one day but not today. It was never going to happen just I wished it would.
She returned and tried to did the best she could to get it back to normality but it was never going to be the same. I became the dreaded latchkey kid I never wanted to be. The day that became reality was the day I told someone about my secret. I was still ashamed, ashamed that my family didn’t love each other anymore. I still blamed myself for not trying to intervene regardless of what anybody else said. Every time I walked around the house it was still the same although, there was a ghostly silence. Dinnertime was like someone had pressed the mute button on a remote control and stopped the arguments but this time I wasn’t blocking out the...