Comfort & the vision of a horse in the night-time

I've had a lifetime of mediating my parents' fights. Immature threats and silences bandied about like toys.
Accusations of neutrality, bias, and everything in between.
Of not understanding.
My mother whinnying, father opening the newspaper too wide.

Young mare, just wanting to stand still in a drizzling field or take a nap in the stables.

I looked in through the sliding glass doors on my humid teenage runs around the house. (I had suddenly and briefly rebelled against my desert circumstances and had taken to
heart-pumping sticky-aired jogs around the villa at night.)

There my family would be, slumped against the too-plump couch, eyes on a box of coloured light. My mom might be sucking the fibrous seed of a mango, all yellow. Dad glancing from behind the third newspaper of the day. Maybe my sister was there, maybe she was holed up in her bedroom at that point, attempting to do homework on her bed and inevitably falling asleep on it instead.

I didn't want to be unthinking in the evening like that, robotic and un-alive-looking to someone peeking through a sliding glass door. But that was who I was.

I knew when I returned inside and joined them again, it would no longer bother me.
I would be comfortable, comforted, slumped back in a too-plump couch and alright with it all.