The house wasn’t a home; it was the front line. No car engine noise—just the scrape of his worn shoes, always within my room, my tomb, my refuge.

The walk from the school felt like crossing a heavily mined border. Every step was weighted with dread. I approached the door not knowing what form the explosion would take. Would it be the sound of shattered objects and shouting—just rage and anger? Or would it escalate, swift and brutal, to violence and pain? The not-knowing was a knife twisted slowly, the tension measured in bottles.

I learned to be small, to take up no space, my entire existence tuned to the volume of his imminent threat.

There was her, too—my mother. The one loving person, also a casualty of war. I saw the hollow look in her eyes, the way she flinched, and I put myself between her and the threat, a small, fragile shield. I became her protector, willing to absorb the impact.

But her struggle also meant she was absent. A ghost in the room, present in body, but her mind was gone— consumed by the fear, trapped in her own internal bunker. A loving presence, who could not actually be there for me. Her absence was a cold spot in the heart of the house.

Safety was a foreign country I could never visit. Trust was a myth, a rumour carried on the polluted air. I tried to hold them, to press my face to them— but they were water. They slipped away like sand through my fingers. How do you touch something that doesn’t exist?

The distance between my fear and his anger was often zero. I measured my survival not in minutes, but in the millilitres beside his bed and chair, left in the bottle.

I grew. My frame hardened. I became taller, heavier, stronger than the memory.

The confrontation came, later. The final, ugly, fight in the narrow hallway. Not the scared child, but the grown veteran finally fighting for real – an act of defense against the ultimate fear, a messy, furious closure that left him bleeding.

Now I am an adult, walking streets kilometers away. I still flinch at sudden noises, and my body still checks for exits. I may have won that last physical battle, but the war is internal, confined in the space of my own mind. The soldier is home, but the quiet doesn’t feel like peace. The deepest trauma is the constant, quiet knowledge that the ground underneath me is still shaking, and I am still waiting to find out which kind of storm is coming next.