It's so strange to me that there are people in this world who have never known the fear. People who have never had to know the fear. That there are men and women who don't have to lock their doors at night. People who do not lie awake listening for a break in the silence, for the sound of tires crunching gravel when an unwanted visitor arrives. Mothers who do not keep a bag of their children's clothes packed in the car at all times in case they need to make a quick escape. Kids who have never stayed awake peeking through the crack beneath the bathroom door, ready to phone the emergency center at the first sight of blood, the second the person they love begins to froth at the mouth. It surprises me each time I remember there are teenagers who have never stood frozen, waiting for the moment they will either be struck or spared. Young adults who don't need to sigh when, after seven months of serenity, they find needles hidden in the bathroom cabinet. And these people - the people who don't know the fear - they don't understand when you explain the bindings of blood. How you stick by your family even when you hate them. Even when they destroy you. They don't understand why your uncle won't just kick his brother out rather than pay for his rent, pay for his groceries, pay for his cigarettes, pay for his heroin addiction. They don't understand your mother driving to bring her sister-in-law chocolate at three in the morning because she's scared she's going to kill herself. They don't understand how your great grandmother getting cancer could result in her children turning against each other. They're not sure why you don't talk to all of your relatives, yet your mother's mother can fly to Fiji to defend her husband in a court case when she can't even stand to live in the same house as him. And this isn't all love so don't call it that.There's just something about being broken for so long that forces you to crumble together rather than fall apart. It sucks looking after the children while their parents conference in the living room about what to do next about this, that, him or her, and it sucks sneaking into your childhood home to collect your aunty's things because if you're too loud your uncle might get paranoid and try to kill you. Not all children have to change their names so their father can't find them. Not all grandfathers are sent away for dealing drugs. There are people who don't know the relief of making it back to the car in one piece. People who don't wait for gunshots to rain down on them as they pull out the drive way. People who don't wake up every morning surprised to be alive, surprised they weren't strangled in their sleep. There are people who don't press their ears against walls to hear their families trying to decide whether it's safe to stay or if it would be better to run, just in case. Just in case it's another bad day. And I will always be surprised that there are families without this sort of dysfunction. After all these years, it is still so strange to me that there are people who do not know the fear.