Chapter Four – Decisions
I wasn't myself anymore, but then none of us were. I mean, I know that Dad was depressed, but I would never have thought him capable of deliberately scaring us in the way in which he did. And I have always wondered how Grandma managed to persuade him to get help, and the only conclusion that I have ever been able to come up with is that she used emotional blackmail on him, just like he did to us, by telling him that he would lose another family if he carried on in the same way. Then there was Mum; I don't know if she already knew that something big was going to happen, but all of a sudden she started spending a lot more time in London visiting Auntie Neela, who moved back there to be with her family. This is probably happening because Mum needs someone to talk to, and Auntie Neela has been one of her best friends for years now, she is even my Godmother, and I guess she is the only one of Mum's old friends who is in the same country as her, even though it takes several hours on the train to get to London from Manchester. Will has started being difficult, and he and I didn't see eye-to-eye on anything, so we fought a lot more. It was more than that though, he wouldn't get up in a morning, he wouldn't go to bed when he should at night, and he ignored everything that Mum and Dad said to him, and you know what, I didn't blame him because neither of us could tell whether we were being told the truth anymore. I'll admit that I didn't talk to Mum and Dad all that much either during this period, I bottled up feelings, and stayed in my room the whole time. I wouldn't let my parents see me cry because I thought that they were too wrapped up in their own problems to be concerned about me. I became more and more withdrawn at school, yet my teachers didn't care because my work was still of the same high standard, but that was because I was using schoolwork as a distraction, a way of pretending that nothing was wrong, but everything was wrong and nobody noticed.
Dad told us that the medication for his depression was helping him to see things more clearly, and that he felt that he needed a change. One evening he sat us all down and told us that he had bought himself another house and that he was going to be moving out as soon as the people already living there moved out and he got the keys. He said that he needed his own space so that he could get his head together; he said that he couldn't help himself whilst living in the same house as Mum. That was when my world really began to fall apart because it was the first time that I feared that he didn't want anything to do with me, or Mum and Will, anymore.
Incomplete – Backstreet Boys
Empty spaces fill me up with holes
Distant faces with no place left to go
Without you within me I can't find no way
Where I'm going is anybody's guess
I've tried to go on like I never knew you
I'm awake but my world is half asleep
I pray for this heart to be unbroken
But without you all I'm going to be is incomplete