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I live two separate lives.

On one side at university, I’m the life and soul of the party, planning spontaneous drunken nights out. I hide behind a mask and alcohol makes my life OK, even though I’m messed up inside. Alcohol gives me freedom; it allows me to smile when I can’t. In my other life, my home life, I am quiet and withdrawn, this sorry creature caught up in an addiction of self-harm because I have no other kind of freedom. I am lifeless at home.

I come home to my mother’s house, the place that should be my sanctuary. I cannot talk to her. Our conversations fall into awkwardness or don’t happen at all and we are both broken. We both sit there and pretend that we’re OK and that we are just playing Happy Families, following some kind of rulebook.

Summer. Endless days and weeks and months that all blur into nothingness. I come home from university and I fall into a darkness that is suffocating.

“Hello,” mum says one morning. She sits in front of the television and drinks tea. I try and say hello but something boils up inside my heart that scares me so I sit there in silence. The silence hangs over both of us. It is like torture and mum goes to work early. I go upstairs and hurt myself for the way I treat my mother, but treating her like that has become an addiction and it’s thrilling and I can’t understand why.

I wish I was five-years-old again.

I wonder what it is that stands between my mother and I, and it troubles me that only part of me is worried about it. It troubles me that I am so self-absorbed and miserable and that forcing a smile is harder than running the London Marathon.
There is a hideous rain storm outside so I chose not to go for a walk and dig out my old diaries. I lie in the middle of the living room and listen to the rain lash against the window. I flip through useless pages that don’t really tell me anything, although I don’t really know what I’m looking for. I begin to read through my 1993 diary. It feels like an age ago, although it was only two years ago. I see smudges of blood all over the pages and some of them are stuck together. I search for the entry that documents my parent’s divorce, and eventually find it. The page is disgusting.

"April 12th, 1993.
Mum and dad are getting divorced. Mum says it was her choice to divorce dad but dad says it was his. I don’t know what happened, but dad got so violent that I had to run upstairs to escape. He hit mum, I don’t know what he hit her with but he hit her hard. He must have done because there was a loud scream and then crying and then dad just left. I stayed in my room. I was too scared to go downstairs. Mum made a phone call and she went somewhere and came back hours later. I tried to ask her what happened but she wouldn’t look at me and told me to fuck off. It’s about time they got divorced, really.
I don’t know how I feel about it. I never know how I feel about anything. Sometimes I think that I just don’t have feelings and that I am a cold heartless.”

I read it and I still do not know what happened on that day. I sit for a while and mull over my thoughts. There is probably some kind of deeper psychological theory for all that I think and feel and for the failed relationship with my mother. My mother’s situation is probably hopeless. Yet I remember how I isolated myself once my parents got divorced and my father moved out. It seemed to me at the time that life was simply full of shit and there was nothing you could do about that. Still it seems like that to me today, and all I can do is try and get through each day trying not to think too hard about my purpose in life.

I re-read the entry and tears prick into my eyes. A few roll down my cheek and I take a deep breath, for this is foreign territory and I can’t remember when I last cried. I imagine mum sitting at her desk at work, chatting away to her colleagues with that innocent smile she has on her face. There is beauty in her face and in her heart. This picture startles me somewhat and I turn on the television. I watch an American sitcom about friends and family and it all seems so lovely and happy and like it could be real. Once the show is over I feel sick and turn it off, pulling myself back into the real world. The rain has stopped and the sun is trying to poke through the dark clouds, sending a heavenly ray of light through the living room. I pick up my diary again and try to read it, but the image of my mother is planted in my heart. I want to scream, I want to scream but I open my mouth and no sound comes out and I go upstairs and relieve the tension and then make a cup of tea.

“July 28th, 1993.
Every time I try to talk to mum about dad she brushes it under the carpet. “I don’t want to talk about your father,” she says. “Why would I want to? He is a pile of filth.” I wonder how she must be feeling but she never talks about it. She never talks anymore.
“I’m upset,” I said.
“What about?” she asked.
“You and dad splitting up,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because it’s my fault,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
Why does my mother not talk? Why does she act like I am some stupid little fly? Maybe the divorce is my fault. Maybe they broke up because of me and she hates me. But I don’t understand. Why won’t she listen or let me talk about my dad? Why won’t she talk at all? All she does is sit there and drink alcohol and she doesn’t tell anyone about that. She won’t go for therapy. She doesn’t ever talk about the divorce and she’s building up her pain. She’s building it up every day and it’s getting harder and harder.”

Maybe I remind her of him, and every time she looks at me she is filled with disgust. I go to the bookcase and pick out my baby photo album and discover that most of the pictures have been ripped out. There are no pictures of my father and I. I look through all of the photo albums and throw them on the floor because most of them are half empty. There are pictures of me and mum at Christmas, birthdays, holidays, days out, in the garden, smiling. I don’t understand why I throw them around the room. I don’t know why I can’t stand the fact that mum has erased all evidence of my dad. I guess I just wish that our lives were like the lives of those on the American sitcom, or that I was just an innocent child again, living in peaceful bliss and ignorance. I wonder when the music of laughter last rang out in this house.

My mother comes home. “Hello, dear,” she says.

“Hello,” I say. “When’s dinner?”

“In about an hour, I expect,” she says. “Horrible weather, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I say, looking out of the window and see that the rain is falling again.

I go upstairs and watch television. My mother cooks the dinner downstairs and sings badly to the radio, and the house is filled with life again. When dinner is ready she calls me and I go downstairs. We sit there in silence and eat, and I pretend to be deeply interested in the rain outside or in my dinner. I glance up once at my mother, and she is not really looking at anything in particular.

“It’s nice, this stew, isn’t it?” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

“It’s a new recipe I thought I would try,” she says. “Shall I make it again one night?”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s the nicest stew I have ever had. I can’t remember the last time I had dumplings.”

I mean what I say. The dumplings whizz me back in time and I try to remember what it was like to be five-years-old, eating stew and dumplings and smiling and telling mummy about school and all the wonderful games you played and things you did at school. Then mummy sits you on her lap and gives you a cuddle and follows some kind of bedtime routine lovingly. I pull myself back to reality and I am not five-years-old but nineteen and I cannot smile.

We finish dinner and mum cleans up the dishes while I watch the news. I cannot force myself out of my chair and I hate myself for the laziness that I cannot change. There is a heavy weight on my heart and a heavy burden on my shoulders. Pain rests upon the room and will not be healed, and there is guilt and shame and dark secrets that float around but no one dares to talk about them. There are secrets that no one will dare speak of, secrets that they do not want the other to know about. We are actors and we must perform right. Anything that breaks the performance is forbidden. We cannot be in darkness if we want to play happy families. The room is heavy and suffocating and I have to leave and take refuge in my bedroom, where I can escape and ponder further why I am like this. It leads me to asking questions that are far too philosophical. Who am I? I ask myself, lying on my bed and staring at my ceiling. I cannot answer myself because I do not know myself.

It is like I am floating between some undefined stages of my life. I am not this kind of person. I am not that kind of person. I don’t know who I want to be. I am not anyone my mother wants me to be. She wants to perform and act perfect and brush away anything that is not part of the performance. I want to talk about feelings I don’t realise I have. I want to talk about my past, my present, my future. I want to murder the thing that is killing our relationship.

The volume of the TV downstairs is turned up high. I sigh and pick up my journal and begin to write.
As I write, I learn. It is like writing is the key to my thoughts that I so easily trap. I realise that I was a selfish child who did not listen to his mother when she was hurting. She had lost her husband, she must have felt guilt. Maybe she still feels guilt now. There is a pain that we both share because we were both hurt by the same person. I bite my lip hard as tears threaten to fall. I want to change everything and gain my mother back but it is not easy when the pain is so forbidden. The pain sweeps through my mind and turns into hatred that my father could have ever come between us that way. I do not know my mother’s heart, yet it is possible that she is the same as me and is too scared to talk about things that happened so long ago. We are both broken shells of human beings consumed by selfishness and fear. I want to run to her. I write about my secrets even though I do not want to. Secrets damage a relationship. I feel on the verge of exploding and I release that, and my heart is pushing me to go downstairs. It’s like I’m having some kind of revelation and it all seems so simple. We have tried to play Happy Families for too long.

I put my pen down and go downstairs. I try to force a smile but my eyes glaze over with tears. I blink and ignore them and turn to mum, and sit next to her on the sofa. I do not have a plan or anything but the only thing I can do is trust myself.

“Mum,” I say.

“Yes?” she says, her eyes still fixed on the TV.

“I’m sorry I was never there for you when you and dad got divorced,” I say, spewing the words out. I begin to breathe too quickly. I want to get up and leave because I have said enough but mum starts to cry and the performance has gone haywire. It’s like we were both waiting patiently, hoping that along the line someone would say something about our feelings. That someone would dare to dig deep.

Mum composes herself and turns off the TV and puts her arm around me. “Don’t be so silly,” she says. “It was my job to be there for you and I never was.” There is a brief silence that lasts for an eternity. Mum takes a huge gulp of wine. “Look at what the divorce has done to you! You need therapy. I’ve got nothing to say. My parents were furious with the divorce.”

“You’ve never got anything to say,” I snap. “And I don’t need therapy.”

There is a longer, deeper silence and I wish that the TV was on. I move away to go back upstairs, but I start to cry so hard and I can’t stop. I stand there for five full minutes crying. Then, taking a few deep breaths, I calm down a little.

“I’m sorry I bought all this up,” I say, wiping my eyes. “I was reading my old diaries today for something to do, and I just wanted to try and talk to you. I’ve been a completely horrible son to you ever since that all happened. I guess I blamed you and I blamed dad and I felt very sorry for myself.”

Mum sighs and goes to the kitchen to get more wine. “Don’t disappear upstairs again,” she says. “It’s alright.”

I stretch, and my sleeve falls down my wrist to reveal the angry crisscross patterns of cuts and scars and I quickly pull my sleeve down and look at mum quickly. She is staring at me and at my arm with wide eyes and a ghost-like face. She drowns her wine down in one long gulp and sways a little on the spot.

“Shit,” she says. “What have I done to you? What have I done? You’re so broken. You need therapy.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, not looking at her.

“I just saw your arm!” Mum says, slamming her fist on the table. Her words have begun to slur. “It was covered in cuts! Oh crap, it was disgusting. No, no.” She begins to break down again. “No, I don’t mean that. It’s not disgusting. You can’t help it. I don’t understand. Why would you do that to yourself?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say. “It’s my drug, like alcohol is yours.”

“Why do you do it?” Mum says in a hushed tone.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say again. Mum tries to pull my sleeve up again but I don’t let her. She sighs. She shrugs and wraps her arms around me and we embrace. She rubs my back, whispering gently in my ear and I feel like I am five-years-old again, when mum comforted me after I fell over and cut my knee. The moment lasts. It’s a beautiful gift.

When we pull apart we smile weakly at each other. Mum goes to get more wine but I take the bottle away from her and go upstairs. The TV breaks the silence and life seems to go back to normal again. I pull my sleeve down and grab scissors, and soon my heart stops racing. I let the pain drip, drip, drip on the page and I think about mum sitting downstairs and I smile. We broke the rules tonight. I slip down a few stairs and poke my head around, and I watch mum for a little while. It comforts me to see her still crying. I tiptoe back to my room and pull on my pyjamas. As I fall into a peaceful sleep, the moon outside shines brightly through my curtains; our house is under the spotlight, and my room is illuminated with a hope that I have not known before.