Must Not Be Blank

A fly inches up the window. It is as if someone were pulling a little string, tug tug tug and sending it like a Christmas toy hilariously up the glass. Only it isn't Christmas. It's the other highly charged side of the year. Thirty-five years ago the unbearable tension in my home was about to erupt. The protracted process of my parents' separation would begin with my sister telling me that my mother wanted to leave my father. And then a few incomprehensible weeks of knowing this when my father didn't. That summer I left the school I'd attended for eight years, my best friend moved away, and suddenly I was faced with the prospect of leaving the house where I'd lived for eleven years, and going to live in another town, without my father. Carefree summer after the big exams, but I was lying awake at night crying, my childhood in ruins.