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A Fresh Start

Posted on February 25, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

He walked out on his wife and kids one Sunday morning before summer had properly set in. There was no ‘other’ woman or man involved in this decision. He had simply tired of family ties and adult responsibilities. He prepared for his children’s future for months before he made the move. He ensured that his wife had the necessary money available to cover the months it would take for her to adjust and find her feet. He cleared out his bank account and left for cooler climes from where he could begin a new life.

He had made the decision after a particularly bad day at work. He had ceased to enjoy what he did years ago. He had stayed on because the periodic raise made it seem like a bad idea to give up the steady arrival of a comfortable sum of money. But it also made little sense to him that a boss who was his superior merely because he spent a larger portion of his life working for the company was allowed to make him feel the way he did that day. He also failed that day to justify accepting the abuse as ‘part of the job’.

He returned home from work to a wife who was unconcerned with the day he’d had. His children didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by the fact that Daddy didn’t seem to be coping too well. Everyone was immersed in the demands of their own world and it seemed wrong to him to have to exist in his own personal limbo so that others could continue along their individual trajectories. He made the decision out of anger but his thoughts became organized and well-settled over the months it took for him to put his affairs in order. He managed it all with the middle class attention to detail that had allowed his family to enjoy vacations during breaks from school, new clothes during festival season and the creature comforts most households in his neighbourhood were accustomed to.

He had invested wisely, more for the purpose of saving for a rainy day rather than as an early retirement plan by speculating on a volatile stock market. He had achieved a blemish-free attendance record at work for nine years and been a faithful husband for eleven by the day he made his decision to leave it all behind.

His well-managed finances allowed him to purchase a small house in the city he decided to make his new home. The air was cooler and cleaner, the people were friendly and they had the good sense to leave a man who valued his privacy alone. His family never heard from him again even though he was no more than a few hundred miles away. His wife cried and cursed and then took a succession of lovers before finally marrying a man who did not appreciate another man’s kids growing up in his house. The children were sent to boarding school so that their stepfather could enjoy his drink. Coincidentally they were sent to the same city their father had taken up residence in. Actually it was less coincidence and more a lack of imagination that led to his children becoming boarders in the same place their father lived in because they had visited the place on vacation several years before and one afternoon when they were being particularly badly behaved, their father had mentioned, half-seriously, that they would be left behind at the local boarding school if they didn’t behave.

One morning, the man who now sported a beard and different clothes from the ones he wore in his earlier life passed his children in the street. The boy was something of a gang leader and his sister was the quiet child who tried to stay so far out of trouble that she was little more than a ghost. Parent and children passed mere feet from each other and neither side managed even a flicker of recognition for the other.

The man misses his family sometimes but in the academic manner of people who remember a lost belonging they never really had much use for. He doesn’t ever regret his decision to leave.

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