The Day Everything Split
By Anoushka, student at St Augustine’s Priory
I was 9, not even in secondary school. 9 years old.
I remember the sound of the suitcase wheels more than anything.
They scraped across the hallway floor like something tearing, and even now, that sound echoes in my head when I least expect it; when I’m brushing my teeth or watching rain slide down a window. It was the sound of everything changing.
That was the day my mother told me and my little sister that she and my dad were separating.
It didn’t come with shouting. No one threw plates or slammed doors like in the movies. Instead, it came with silence. The kind of silence that hums in your ears and makes your stomach ache because something unspoken is crawling under your skin. The kind of silence that is so loud it presses against your ear like a scream no one else can hear.
We were sitting on the sofa, my sister’s small hand wrapped tightly around mine. Mum stood in front of us, eyes puffy and tired, like she hadn’t slept in weeks. Dad was there too, but he looked… smaller. Like a tree after a storm, still standing, but half-hollowed out.
“We’re going to take a little time apart,” Mum said. Her voice was soft, too soft. Like she was afraid the words might bruise us if she said them too loud. “Just for now.”
But even at 15, I knew what “just for now” really meant.
My sister turned to me immediately, searching my face like it could tell her what would happen next. She always looked at me like that, like I had the answers. I had to hold it together. At that moment, I felt something shift. Like the roles between us flipped, and suddenly I wasn’t just her big sister anymore. I was the one she needed to be strong, steady, safe.
That same evening, Mum packed a bag for me and one for her. She didn’t explain where we were going. Dad stood in the doorway, trying to say something, anything, but his words got lost somewhere in his throat. He looked at us like he wanted to reach out but didn’t know if he was allowed to anymore.
It all happened so fast. Just like that we were gone.
We left. We stayed at Mum’s friend’s house that night. I hadn’t seen her in years, but she opened the door like we were family. Her house smelled like cinnamon and warm laundry. She tucked us into a guest room with floral bedsheets and a cracked window that let in the cold. After school, we kept going back to that house – again and again. We stayed for nearly six months. I could barely make sense of it; I can’t imagine what it felt like for my sister.
We didn’t see Dad again for a year.
At first, it felt like he’d vanished into thin air. His absence was everywhere; in the empty chair at dinner, the quiet of Sunday mornings, the way Mum stopped playing music in the kitchen. My sister kept asking when we’d go home. I kept telling her this was home now. I said it enough times, I almost started to believe it.
And in all of that, I became someone else, someone older. I helped her get dressed for school, packed her lunch when Mum forgot, wiped her tears in the middle of the night. I learned how to keep my voice calm even when my chest was a mess of fear. I was more of a mother to her than Mum could manage to be back then. And the strange thing is, I didn’t resent it. It felt like this unspoken promise I’d made her: that no matter how far everything fell apart, I wouldn’t.
And that was my kind of bravery. Not loud or flashy. Just showing up, every single day, even when I wanted to fall apart myself.
Eventually, we saw Dad again. It wasn’t perfect. It was awkward and strange and painful in places. But it was real. And ‘real’ felt like a beginning.
Even now, when I hear the scrape of suitcase wheels, I think of that day. The day everything split.
And the day I learned how to hold someone else together, while I was quietly breaking, too.
