I was only three when it was just me and my father left, our family reduced to a pair of shadows in an echoing house. I never knew my mothershe vanished before my memory began, choosing the arms of another man over ours. Dad never tried to fill the gap she left; instead, he poured his soul into raising me, shaping his days and nights around my needs as his only child.
Years flickered by, at once slow and hurried. When I grew up, degrees and wedding bells followed in a blur that seemed both distant and immediate, as it happens in dreams. My wife, Aliceher name floating as lightly as an English spring morningbrought with her questions about where wed live. My father owned a rambling cottage in a sleepy village edged by hedges and the calls of wood pigeons, a place big enough for laughter and quiet. But both Alice and I were tied to jobs in the city, with its restless swirl and streetlamps flickering like fireflies, so rural comfort seemed out of reach.
My father, as ever, met the crossroad with calm. He offeredalmost absently, as if speaking underwaterto sell the village house and downsize to a modest flat in London, so we could all stay together. I took his words as guidance spoken by a wise old tree in some strange garden, and soon we were living as three in warm, shared rooms.
And with time, our little constellation grew. Our son arrived, a bright star, and my fathers devotion welled up anew as he became a doting grandfathertaking the boy to watch ducks paddle in the park and reading old adventure tales among mountains of toys. While I was away working, Alice kept the home spinning with invisible threads, keeping us in harmony, a clockwork of contentment.
But, as often happens in such drifting dreams, the balance twitched. The day came when we learned Alice was expecting again, the flats two small rooms suddenly feeling as crowded as an Underground carriage at rush hour. I picked up extra work, hunting for ways to stretch our world: longer hours, quick schemes, dreams flickering with pound coins.
One evening, returning with the citys dust still in my hair, I found the house eerily quiet. Alice and our son sat at the tiny table, but my father was missing. My heart twisted, heavy with dread and the muddled fear that dream-logic brings. Had something terrible happened? Alice whispered hed gone out for a walk, rubbing her belly as if to conjure him back.
The night melted into another, empty of his return. Worry pooled into panic. It drifted out that Alice and my father had quarreled, sharp words tangling in the crammed spaces of the flat. Perhaps her swelling belly, full of new life, had sharpened her temper. The place felt too small for all our hopes and doubts, and in her tired honesty shed told my father she thought he was in the way.
Fury rose in me, thick and quick as English fog. I fled into the dark in our battered old car, headlights sweeping the mist. There, on a park bench beneath orange sodium lights, I found Dada spectator in his own sorrow, tears painting rivers down his weathered face. Id never seen him unravel so. My own heart felt brittle as a dry leaf. Falling to my knees, I sobbed, Forgive us, Dad. Forgive Aliceshe didnt mean the things she said, not truly.
An hour passed in ripples and eddies. At last, we all drifted home together, my father folding himself away in his room with a cough and a far-off stare.
Later, speaking to Alice through the haze of fatigue and regret, I told her quietly that if such storms returned, regardless of her growing child, she would have to leaveso the homes fragile peace would not crack entirely. The well-being and harmony of our three-generational family, spun out in these floating corridors, had to come firsteven as the dream-world shuffled us onward, never quite the same again.
