The breaking of a family is not really an happy circumstance, its not exactly an occasion to raise your pompoms and prance about in excitement. She's had heartbreak and sadness and pain. But she believes that you grow through adversity, it makes you a stronger person.

This was, essentially, one of the best things that has happened to her. It has made her more mature, stronger and more independent that she has ever been in her whole life. At first she felt like someone had violently knocked me from her perch. She had no sense of balance, no stars to guide her, only an inkling of a thought that someone somwhere in the world is going through harder times.

Famine. Death. Loss of Dignity. Fear. Torture.

She can recite a longer list of cruelties that life can churn out. It is not hard to pick at loose strings. She could continue throwing wild accusations at my parents for their foolishness, their inability to perceive how much this would affect, not only her,her brother and her extended family but how society viewed them as a whole.

To everyone (especially her traditional grandparents) they have failed of course. Nature has taught us, since the beginning of time, that the foundation of life begins with the family as a unit. Without a family, is there a life? Is there a purpose?

It took her a long time to reconcile the fact, that her family was never......meant to be. She felt so blind, so stupid that she never realised her family could not possibly be a whole. They were like ill fitted pieces of a puzzle, like a hoard of hounds on leashes, each pulling at its own direction, wanting an escape, wanting out.

Now that finally the chains are let loose. They can all breathe again.

At night before she goes to sleep and hovering somewhere between dreams and memories, she likes to replay in her mind when her family did seem happy. Patches of instances and moments which convinced her that the last 17 years were not lived in vain........her father telling her and her brother made up bed time stories.........her mother patting a loose hair on her father's head lovingly during his 40 birthday dinner..............playing cards on Friday nights where both of her parents would make sure her brother and her would win....

The next time someone expresses regret that her family is " a lost case". She will smile inwardly.

Because her family is a beautiful ruin that no one will ever understand.

Just a memory blowing in the wind, incomplete but still very much alive.