[Finding]

They left me in their storm of angry silence. The last sentence was still hanging in the air, a searing "What do you want then?!" dripping frustration, fury, and desperation. Excellent question, really. They hit me right on the mark, straight to my heart with that question. Everything I had done recently, everything I had been doing always, left my wondering that precise question. As always, I didn't have an answer. And now, I didn't have them either.

I sat there, elbows propped on the island table in the kitchen, head bowed in my hands, eyes watching the hopeless tears piling up upon scoop upon scoop of ice cream. Nauseating. Combinations of churned cow lactations and human bodily fluids in a bowl never look very appetizing, but I kind of wanted to eat it anyway. I jabbed at the comfort food with my spoon repeatedly, never once actually bringing a spoonful to my mouth. The house resounded in quiet, which made me feel lonelier and slightly mystified with their disappearance. It was almost as though they vanished.

I picked up my bowl and sat criss-crossed on the wood floor. It put the granite table and very modern-looking couches straight in my field of view. There you have it, I thought, a decent summary of my life. Lots of pretty things and plenty of money with the constant feeling of a missing something. Emotional linkage, I supposed.

It's really cold, I realized. Chillier than I thought it was, and I probably didn't pick up on it sooner because I was caught up in shouting things I didn't mean and miscommunicating again. I looked out the window, wondering how much colder it'd be outside than indoors. I briefly felt lucky that I wasn't out there shivering in the wind, and that was immediately washed away with a flood of guilt when I saw the Mexican yard hands my parents had hired.

They were speed-walking around our property with tulip bulbs in hand. They were working hard and trying their very best to be efficient. One of the men's children ran up to him, grabbing the knee of his trousers. The kid's eyes looked brightly up at his father, and instead of pushing his son away, the man set aside his job for a few minutes. He picked up the little boy and spun around a few times and stopped only to set him down in the wheelbarrow, where there were more tulip bulbs waiting to be set in the ground.

I wondered if this is how prisonsers feel sometimes. They had everything provided for them, food, shelter, and clothes, but there were always people stuck with them on the inside, and they were not the best people to be around. However, in my situation, everything was upscaled forty times and much prettier. I could see why my sister Marissa ran off with that low-life artist, even though he seemed to be hooked on a new drug every week. Despite the drug-induced haze he was typically in, the look of pure love and caring never escaped his expression when he looked at her. And then I finally saw, from the inside looking out, what had always been missing. And, emptying the final tears from my drying well, I knew what I wanted.