Sand Castle

My parents married each other out of passion, and as a fruit of their love my sister and I were born. We were very loved by everyone, because we were the youngest of all my cousins.

But still, my parents had problems; my father’s overbearing jealousy damaged their relationship a lot.

They would fight and spend several days without speaking to each other.

Every year we had a habit to go on a family vacation in August, it felt like that month everything got better, my parents were always happy, hugging each other, and they would walk and hold hands like two lovebirds.

It was a city up north in Portugal; actually we could see Spain from the other side of the river. My father would rent a house in front of the beach and there we would enjoy the summer’s sun.

My sister and I were extremely happy to be able to get away from the day-to-day routines, not study, simply enjoy doing nothing, only the beach, the sun and the sea; it was amazing.

We enjoyed it so much, early in the morning we would go to the beach, swim a lot, the beach was beautiful and the water was clear, we almost didn’t have any waves, and we would play in the sand. It was everything we could ever dream of.

At night we would go the town center and eat ice cream, there was always a band playing live and we would stay there several hours.

Everything seemed like a dream, when all of a sudden something would happen and the sand castle would fall.

My parents would fight for some reason and all of sudden all of that happiness would be threatened. The atmosphere would transform on the spot, my father would become serious and quiet.

I didn’t understand why that would happen; everything was going so well, why couldn’t it stay that way? I would ask myself.

We were still on vacation, the place was beautiful, but it was no longer the same, we would wait for things to go back to normal, but it wasn’t as fast as we would have liked it to be. The same thing would always happen.

This was normal in our house, my parents had problems and I didn’t know how to handle them, we grew up trying to help them solve their dilemmas while we were still little girls, but things couldn’t get better. It was good for some time, but later they would fight and it would just be sad again.

This story is part of my testimony; I will continue it in the next article.