It has been a year since my family was last whole—not the kind of wholeness you lose when children leave the home, but the kind that breaks apart quietly in the kitchen.

I can still remember my mother on the kitchen floor.

“Mummy, I’m home. Where’s daddy?”

She looked up, her face wet, lips trembling.

“He’s not here.”

“Huh?”

“He left, baby.”

I can’t remember if I cried then. Thirteen years have blurred the edges of that day, softened it into something almost distant. Maybe that’s for the best. Some memories aren’t meant to be relived -- only carried in silence.

No one tells you that when a family falls apart, it doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in fragments. In unfinished conversations. In questions that are asked once and never again.

I used to think that there would be a moment where everything made sense. A conversation where someone would finally sit me down and explain—properly and completely—why things turned out the way that they did.

That moment never came.

--

I started writing letters that I could never send. I addressed them to “Sunflower,” because it felt easier to speak to something that couldn’t interrupt, couldn’t correct me, couldn’t tell me that I was too young to understand.

In one of those letters, I wrote about our last “complete” family trip. Not complete in joy—just complete in numbers. Everyone present. Everyone playing their part.

That was the last time.

I told myself I was okay with it. Maybe this was for the better—that endings didn’t have to mean loss, but could mean change, growth, something new.

Some days, I believed it.

Other days, I felt like I was back to being that child in the kitchen, standing there, waiting for an answer that never came.

--

As I got older, something shifted.

People stopped explaining things to me. Or maybe they never really did—I just stopped expecting them to, and I stopped trying to figure it all out.

My mother, who once carried the weight of my emotions alongside her own, slowly began to let go. Not out of neglect, but out of necessity. There are only so many battles a person can fight at once.

And I realised something uncomfortable: one day, I would have to carry myself.

Not because I wanted to, but because no one else could do it forever.

Growing up isn’t a single moment. It’s a quiet accumulation of realisations. The kind that don’t announce themselves, but settle into you slowly.

Like understanding that the people you rely on are also just people—flawed, tired, trying.

Like accepting that some conversations will never happen, no matter how much you rehearse them in your head.

--

I used to ask myself a question I could never answer:

If this was how it would end, then why did it begin at all?

Why build a family only for it to fall apart? Why bring three children into something that wouldn’t last?

I asked my parents once. Not in anger—just curiosity.

They didn’t have an answer either.

And for a long time, that frustrated me more than anything else. Not the separation, not the distance—but the absence of reason. I thought closure came from understanding.

I was wrong.

--

What unsettled me most wasn’t the arguments or the tension—it was everything that went unsaid.

The way conversations would stop halfway.

The way certain topics became off-limits without ever being declared so.

The way we all learned, quietly, to avoid stepping on the same cracks.

Silence became our way of surviving—not because we had nothing to say, but because saying it would have broken whatever was left.

In that silence, I learned how to hold things inside—questions, frustrations, things I didn’t know how to articulate without making everything worse.

Maybe that’s what it means to grow up in a family like mine. Not becoming stronger, exactly—just becoming quieter and smaller

Maybe that’s what it means to grow up like this—not that you lose your voice, but that you learn when not to use it.

--

I don’t think that I’m that child anymore.

I don’t wait by the door for explanations, I don’t have that kind of patience. I don’t expect things to be resolved neatly, or at all. I don’t assume that love, once present, will always stay.

But I also don’t think I’m entirely okay with it.

There are still moments—small, unexpected—where I feel the absence of something I can’t quite name. Not a person, not a memory, but a version of life that never fully existed.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to make sense of all along.

Not the divorce.
Not the past.

But the gap between what was, and what could have been.

--

Maybe families don’t really end.

Maybe they just change shape, slowly and without asking if we’re ready.

Maybe the answers we’re looking for were never meant to be given—only lived through, piece by piece, until they stop feeling like questions.

I still don’t know why my parents began if they were going to end.

But I’ve stopped waiting for an explanation.

And for now, that feels like the closest thing to peace.