House of Tears

There’s something wrong with Alex. Something I can’t quite place. His whole aura has darkened around him. The usual sparkle that follows him everywhere has gone out, leaving something dimmer in its wake. He’s withdrawn. Changed, almost beyond recognition. A completely different child. I lie awake worrying about him. I feel unsettled. On edge. I keep hearing him getting out of bed, stomping downstairs, then stomping back up again. Every time my eyes drift south, I’m startled awake by another bang, another set of heavy footsteps on the stairwell, another door slam. The landing light flicks on. Then off again. Then on. Then off. Like a lighthouse warning me off rocks I can’t yet see. Someone once said parenthood isn’t easy. And boy, were they right. I roll over and bury my face in the pillow. Perhaps if I ignore the thirteen-year-old rhinoceros currently rampaging through my hallway, sleep will eventually claim me. It doesn’t. Instead, I hear the four words no parent ever wants to hear. “Mum.” A pause. “Mum.” Another pause. “Mum.” And then again. “Mum.” “Mum.” “Mum.” “Mum.” Over and over. Frantic. Desperate. The sound of somebody drowning and hoping you’re close enough to throw them a rope. I shoot upright and launch myself out of bed. Alex is sitting halfway down the stairs. Sobbing. Fat, heavy tears. As if something inside him has finally cracked open. He looks impossibly young. Curled into himself as though he’s trying to make his body smaller. As though he can somehow shrink himself beyond the reach of the world and all its sharp edges. My heart folds in half. I want to hug him. God, I want to hug him. But I hesitate. We don’t really do hugs anymore. There wasn’t a dramatic ending to them. No shared agreement. No final cuddle. They just… faded. One day he was climbing into my lap. The next he was twelve. Then thirteen. Now his hugs have all the warmth and flexibility of an ironing board. I miss it. I miss the days he’d tap me on the shoulder and I’d open up my wing and gather him in. Now I know my place. I love him from afar. Our love language comes disguised as other things. His favourite snacks appearing in cupboards. Old films watched together on the sofa while I sit as close as humanly possible before he starts edging away like I’m radioactive. New trainers. Pocket money. Trips abroad. Tiny acts of devotion wrapped in practical packaging. But something has changed. The flamboyantly alive little boy who once made my ribs ache with laughter doesn’t quite find so many things funny anymore. The boy who stubbornly swam against every current simply because someone told him not to. The boy who proudly carried a bright pink pencil case complete with a fluffy flamingo pen. Fabio. The legendary Fabio. A bird so ridiculous it looked like it had escaped from a hen party and somehow found employment in Year Seven. The bird that survived three school years and several suspicious chewing incidents. The boy who, on every non-uniform day, stubbornly wore his school uniform anyway. Just because everybody else wasn’t. Not because he liked the uniform. Quite the opposite. He simply enjoyed the principle of refusing to do what was expected of him. A tiny anarchist in Clarks shoes. That boy is disappearing. Fabio now lies abandoned in a drawer somewhere. Buried beneath adolescence. School. Society. The slow machinery of fitting in. All of it sanding away the rough edges that made him unmistakably Alex. Not the bad edges. The beautiful ones. The tears keep falling. And falling. And falling. “What’s wrong?” I ask softly. “Talk to me.” His shoulders shake. “I can’t do this anymore.” The words hit me like a fist. “It’s too hard.” His voice cracks on the last word. No parent is equipped for that. And suddenly he doesn’t look thirteen anymore. He looks six. Then eight. Then ten. Every version of himself layered on top of the next. Every one of them frightened. The crying intensifies. And then dream logic takes over. The tears begin flooding the house. At first they lap around the skirting boards. Then my ankles. Then my knees. Soon I’m wading through my own living room. Alex’s grief has become a full-scale natural disaster. And I realise, distantly, that I didn’t see it begin. Only the moment it was already here. I trudge forward through chest-deep sorrow. And that’s when I see Jason. A work colleague. Floating past on a black umbrella. As one does. Only he isn’t quite Jason anymore. He’s so thin he’s practically two-dimensional. A human Ryvita. He drifts towards the doorframe. I expect him to collide with it. Instead… Poof. He slips directly through the crack. Gone. I follow him into the hallway. Using the actual door like a normal-sized person. Outside, gale-force winds are howling through the open front door. Jason is being sucked into the night. Umbrella first. Like a wafer-thin Mary Poppins. “Jason!” I shout. He screams. The umbrella spins. His entire body flaps like a lost receipt in a gale. I grab hold. The wind pulls harder. I can’t keep holding him. I have to let go. “Tell my family I loved them!” he yells. “You haven’t got a family!” “Tell somebody!” Then Gary appears. Heroically. Materialising from nowhere, as dream colleagues often do. He catches Jason’s arm. And before I can ask how he intends to save him, Gary places his mouth against Jason’s and starts blowing air into him. Jason begins inflating. Like a bouncy castle. Like a paddling pool. Like a very confused balloon animal. His cheeks puff out. His torso expands. His limbs regain volume. Gradually, blessedly, he regains dimensions. Not many. But enough. “Oh thank God,” I say. “I thought we’d lost him.” Gary turns. His expression darkens. And without warning he snakes a hand up my pyjama shorts. I freeze. The violation is so sudden. So wrong. So unlike him. The dream immediately fills me with revulsion. Gary would never do this. Which somehow makes it worse. I make a mental note to tell Charlotte to avoid him. Then another note reminding myself that Gary isn’t actually a sexual predator and my subconscious is clearly taking recreational drugs without consulting me. I slam the front door. The wind dies. Jason and Gary drift into the sky together, still attached to the umbrella. I wade back through Alex’s tears. Past Alex himself, still sobbing on the stairs. Past floating cushions drifting like lost thoughts. Past family portraits bobbing in the water, still smiling as though nothing has changed. Eventually I reach my husband’s office. Tap. Tap. Tap. The keyboard rattles like machine-gun fire. It’s half past one in the morning. Why is he awake? Through the crack in the door I see hundreds of messages flashing across the screen. Sexual messages. Endless sexual messages. To a woman whose name I can’t quite remember. My stomach drops. He’s cheating. Then suddenly a thought arrives. Clear as daylight. This is ridiculous. My husband isn’t having an affair. Jason isn’t a human Rivita. Gary isn’t a deviant. And tears cannot flood an entire house. I must be dreaming. Unfortunately, instead of becoming lucid and doing something useful, like riding a dinosaur through Tesco or casually passing through walls to spy on the neighbours, I decide that documenting the dream is the most important mission in human history. I swim to the bed. Yes, swim. The mattress becomes a raft. I grab my phone. The screen is soaked. “For fuck’s sake.” I stab frantically at the buttons. Nothing works. The flood rises. Panic follows. I need to write this down. Need to. It feels like life or death. Or more specifically… Write or drown. Then I spot a laptop beside the bed. Not mine. Alex’s. I open it. And immediately my spine tightens. The background photograph fills the screen. A girl in school uniform. Slightly plump. Kneeling. Holding out a ring. Proposing to Alex. “What the fuck?” I stare. Alex stands opposite her. But something feels wrong. Not about the proposal. Not even about the fact my thirteen-year-old appears to be receiving marriage offers. Something about Alex himself. Something about the image prickles at me. Like a word on the tip of my tongue. Like a memory I can’t quite reach. I enter his birthday. Wrong password. Another birthday. Wrong. Another. Wrong. The laptop rejects every version of him I can think of. The floodwater reaches my chest. Then my shoulders. Then my chin. Outside the bedroom door I can still hear him crying. “Mum.” “Mum.” “Mum.” The voice sounds further away now. Or perhaps deeper. As though it’s travelling through water. I look back at the photograph. And suddenly I understand. It isn’t the girl that’s unsettling me. It’s Alex. Because the longer I stare, the less he looks like himself. The face is right. The clothes are right. But all the things that made him him are missing. The mischief. The stubbornness. The glorious refusal to fit in. The pink pencil case. Fabio. The little boy who wore his uniform on non-uniform day simply because everyone else wasn’t. It’s all gone. As though somebody has carefully erased every unique part of him, leaving only a shape behind. A boy-shaped outline. A silhouette wearing Alex’s face. A version polished smooth by the expectations of everyone around him. Safe. Acceptable. Ordinary. And somehow that feels far more frightening than anything else I’ve seen tonight. The water rises over my mouth. Then my nose. And as I take one final breath, the laptop suddenly unlocks itself. The screen changes. The photograph disappears. In its place is a single sentence. A message. Written in Alex’s handwriting. “They were never your tears to drown in, mum.” The flood vanishes. The house vanishes. The dream collapses around me. And I wake. Heart hammering. The room is dark. Silent. No flood. No umbrella Jason. No deviant Gary. No cheating husband. Just the faint glow of the landing light beneath the bedroom door. I lie there listening. Not thinking. Not interpreting. Just listening. Because grief doesn’t always arrive as absence. Sometimes it arrives as something still present, softly insisting it was never fully gone. And somewhere in that half-light between sleep and waking, I realise the worst part isn’t losing Alex. It’s noticing, even in dreams, how much I still reach for him.