At 13 I ran away. I had had an argument with my mother over something insignificant but it made me see red. Literally. It felt as if blood gushed all the way from my limbs to my face, filling my eyes and spilling in my brain. I saw red. Over something so insignificant that I couldn't remember it the next day.

I lashed at my mother. Yelled at her, howled at her, screamed in her face so violently and uncontrollably that she had no option but to slap me.

The slap felt like a bucket of icy water. I did calm down and basked in a surge of vicious satisfaction. I can't tell why I felt like that but it gave me the excuse I needed to punish my mother in the most cruel way I could think of - by disappearing.

I am a mother now and I know a mother's worst nightmare is her child gone missing. You could go insane over that alone. In my subconscious mad mind I was able to sense that and so I punished her.

I ran away and stayed in my grandparents' summer house. It was only a few months after my grandfather had died, and the night scared the living daylight out of me. I flung myself from room to room confronting moon shadows and strange noises. If I hadn't been mad by then, I had gone mad that night. I woke up curled up on the floor behind an armchair, covered with books and magazines.

Meantime my mother was living through hell. When I think about it calmly, now after so many years, I wish I had a chance to say sorry.