The following is an exclusive bonus chapter from my book, The Shape of Ordinary, titled “One Step Forward, One Step Back.” Enjoy!

Bonus Chapter: One Step Forward, One Step Back:

The first thing I ever owned that felt like mine was a Fisher-Price desk. Plastic legs, a bright lamp, a chair that wobbled just enough to remind me of my smallness. To anyone else it was a toy, but to me it was a cathedral. There, in the glow of its little bulb, I painted families, some real, some imagined, and scribbled stories across time. I wrote about the father I had, and the father I wanted. About the life that was given to me, and the one I thought I might shape if I could just learn the rules.

Adults had a way of making rules sound final. This is who you are. This is how you’ll turn out. And as a child, what could I do but believe them? They spoke with the authority of experience, though I know now their words were lined with their own disappointments, their own unfulfilled dreams. But at that desk, I was free. At that desk, I was sovereign. It was the only place where I could make decisions without waiting for permission.

January 6, 1994, began like any other Sunday but ended like none before it. I woke to a quiet house, the kind of quiet that carried weight. My parents’ bedroom wall touched mine, usually a comfort, proof of proximity, proof of safety. That morning, though, the air pulsed with unease.

Church was supposed to be routine, but routine cracked under absence. Dad didn’t come. Mom’s face wore worry like makeup she couldn’t wash away. We dressed anyway, me in the suit that pinched, the tie that choked, the shoes that rubbed blisters into boyhood. I hated the costume, but I loved my mother more, so I wore it.

The service blurred. I remember only the weight of my eyelids and the weight of being watched. In that place, even exhaustion was judged. The ride home was silence stretched too thin, punctured only by the rumble of the car.

Back home, the silence broke into shards. Dad’s anger filled the bedroom, then the hallway, then the whole house. Words I couldn’t understand became sounds I couldn’t forget. My sister and I sat in the living room, waiting for the signal, the one Mom had given us in whispered instructions: If it gets too loud, if something breaks, call 911.
And then the crash. A hole punched through the wall, not just plaster but the illusion of permanence itself. I dialed with trembling fingers, listening to my own breath more than the operator’s words. Minutes later, there were sirens. Minutes later, Dad was in handcuffs.

I watched him go, framed by the police car window, his face caught between rage and resignation. Mom whispered, “Never be like him.” And just like that, the blueprint of my life was redrawn. I wasn’t building toward something anymore; I was building away. Away from his mistakes. Away from his shadow. Away from the hole in the wall that still stared at me long after the plaster was patched.

For years, I carried that Sunday like a scar under my clothes. At my desk, I tried to rewrite it, draft after draft, imagining outcomes where no one yelled, where no one left, where no one had to choose sides. But words can’t glue a family back together. They can only outline the absence, give shape to the ordinary days you lose when the extraordinary comes crashing in.

And maybe that’s why I’ve always questioned the shape of sanity, the shape of normal. Because for me, normal was a house where laughter could fracture into shouting, where a desk lamp was brighter than the sun, where safety was a script no one knew how to follow.

One step forward, one step back, that’s how it felt then, and how it feels even now. I’ve spent decades walking that rhythm, chasing the ghost of who I was at that little desk, and running from the man I was told not to become.

But maybe, just maybe, every step, forward or back, is part of the same dance. And maybe madness isn’t what happens when you lose the rhythm. Maybe it’s what happens when you stop dancing at all.

— James Burge
Author of The Shape of Ordinary