Two suitcases.

Over the 22 years of being married to each other, Annie's parents have been through thick and thin. But mostly thin. They fought. They said things that they didn’t mean. They left some things unsaid. They screamed at the top of their lungs without really knowing what came out of their mouths. They were just a married couple.

When Annie was a little kid, she didn’t really know what was happening. All she remembers is looking through the bars of the stairs, watching her parents hurting each other with their words, and crying her heart out. Then her brother would come sit by her side and comfort her. He really is the best brother anyone could ever ask for. One day she asked him: “Are they gonna get divorced?”. Annie didn’t even know what that meant -she was too young to understand what was going on, old enough not to ignore it. He said no, that everything would be alright. And it did; it always did. This moment, this conversation, it has had a huge impact on her relationship with her brother. Nothing, no one could ever break the faith she had put in him. But then again, she was just a kid. What the heck did she know about life? About anything?

Everybody lies. ▬Gregory House

A few years passed and another fight, among so many other ones, emerged out of nowhere while Annie's family was having dinner. It was a big one though. This, changed the way Annie looked at her dad, and her mom, forever. So, after all the “You whore!”; “You son of a bitch”s, her dad just grabbed two suitcases and threw them from the second floor onto the main floor. He basically asked his wife to pack all her shit and leave the house. As usual, tears started rolling down little Annie's cheeks and she stood there, waiting for her mom’s response to that. All she did was walk past the suitcases and ignore the whole of what had just happened. 

What came after that was dead silence. No one talked. Her dad calmed himself down. Her brother went back to his school work. And Annie went to bed. But one thing that’s been engraved into her memory was the look on her mom’s face as she walked past the two suitcases - it was fear. Fear of losing everything. Fear of losing the home that she took time to decorate oh-so-well. Fear of losing her son and daughter. Fear of losing what she was meant to achieve during her lifetime on this Earth.

She just chose to act indifferent about it. Then the same old story repeated itself - everything went back to normal. But they knew, that one day it would all come out again.