Sample piece for previewing the site. Not a real submission.
Everybody warns you about the lawyers. Everybody warns you about the money, and the weekends with the kids, and how your mates will pick sides even if they swear they won't. All true. None of it is the worst part.
The worst part is the bloody quiet.
Twenty-two years of noise. Her radio in the kitchen. The kids thumping on the stairs. Arguments, even, the last few years. You don't know how much sound a family makes until you're standing in a rented flat at seven in the evening and the loudest thing in the room is the kettle.
I started leaving the telly on. Didn't watch it. Just left it talking. Then I started going to the pub, not to drink much, just to sit near people making noise. Then I caught myself talking to the radio like it was her, telling it about my day, and I thought, Christ, Ben, this is how it starts.
What helped
A lad I work with, younger than me, told me to get a dog. I told him to piss off. He kept on at me about it. Eventually I went to the shelter just to shut him up and came home with an old greyhound called Mags who snores like a chainsaw.
She doesn't fix it. But the flat isn't quiet anymore, and when I talk out loud at night there's something there that lifts its head. Some nights that's the whole difference.