Dousing The Fire Within

He stood in the shadows, craning his neck to watch her dance for one last time before he disappeared out of her life for good. Her body on fire as the homemade audience that stood before her clapped and cheered with polite enthusiasm. They were happy, they didn’t need him either. Daddy, what does it even mean? A strong always present being? A role model? Or just the man that that pays the bills?
She’d always been slightly mad, he always said she was mad, and to start with he loved it but when she drove 100 miles to the beach on Christmas day, with the kids in tow, he decided that she was no longer his kind of mad. She was damn right insane. It used to be different without the kids, they could go on spontaneous drives, they could spend the night by the beach listening to the waves crash under the frosty moonlight while they sat wrapped up drinking hot coffee poured from a flask. It was once fun.
Now he refused to play any part in her fun, in her mad, hippy behaviours that he once loved. So he left. He felt guilty about walking out on them, his only regret that he didn’t take the children from their mother. He wanted them to live a more conventional lifestyle but he was no longer certain what that was, was it 9-5 and shopping at the weekends with the children overwhelmed by a pile of plastic toys or was it just sitting down on Christmas day to watch a film before arguing over a board game nobody really understands the rules to?
He crept away into the darkness, no longer understanding the rules.