Seeker

I’ve never known my parents.
If it weren’t for scientific proof, I would think that my biological parents don’t even exist and that they never have.
But I do have parents, or I did at one point in my life. They just didn’t stick around for me, and I don’t blame them the slightest bit. I would have done the same thing.
Danny is my foster mother. She adopted me shortly after I was born, and I’ve been living with her since.
She’s amazing. The most caring, loving, wonderful person I’ve ever met. She does nothing but care for me and my well being. She’s always trying to find ways to make life easier for me. I love her.
When I was born, my mother disappeared. Simple as that. She came in with a fake, untraceable name, checked in with fake ID, had me, and then left, never to be seen again. I was a baby with no name and no family. Before I was even born, I was alone.
I stayed in the hospital for a couple of days, the doctors making sure I was okay before they sent me to an adoption agency to be put into foster care. But I never made it that far.
A young, twenty-four-year-old single woman had moved to town. She just bought a brand new house on the edge of town, a giant forest as a backyard. She was just beginning her first year at the local hospital as a nurse, and had her eyes set on me the moment my mother fled.
“I had been with her when you were born,” Danny had told me once. “I didn’t think anything of her, just another mother in to deliver her baby.”
Danny had been a nurse looking after my real mother, checking in on me and my mother, making sure everything was good and everyone was healthy and living. Danny told me that she went in to check on my mother, a routine check, just hours after I had been born. She was gone. She didn’t check out of the hospital, she didn’t tell anybody she was leaving. She just ran off, leaving me behind with no remorse.
In the few days I stayed in the hospital, my mother’s name had been looked into. There was nothing. It was a fake name, as was expected. I was alone. Before I was even born I was alone.
Danny looked after me while I was in the hospital, making sure that even though I didn’t have a mother to care for me, I had someone.
Soon, papers were signed and I had a new mother. A real mother.
Sixteen years she's been looking after me, making sure I get the most normal life I can have.
But it's hard to have a normal life. It's hard to act as though every is perfectly fine when it obviously isn't. It's hard to put on a smile and a happy face every when everything is falling apart before me.
So when I need some time to get away from all the chaos and insanity, I go to the forest.
When Danny moved into town, she bought a small family home. Three bedrooms, two baths. It's nice, comforting and warm. The backyard is small, but it's made up for by the forest stretching with hundreds of pathways and ponds hiding inside, waiting for me to find. 
When I was younger, I wandered off into the forest. I got lost, spent the night in there. It was scary, but while I was lost, I found something. I found a small pond, about a fifteen minute walk into the forest. There's a huge tree, the trunk so big that you would need at least five people to wrap their arms fully around it. There's bushes and flowers surrounding, sweet, pine scents floating through the air. It's completely calming. This is where I go to clear my head. This is where I feel totally at peace. 
I practically sprint through the forest, wondering off the bike trail and onto my own trail, only visible to me. I push past the heavy bushes and slither through the trees until I see it. The small pond, just wide enough to fit a small truck or a large car into. It wasn’t very deep. I've gone swimming in it before, but it comes up just to my hips. The water in it is always warm in the summer, and it freezes over in the winter. There's small fish that live inside the pond, and it isn't rare to see frogs and toads skipping around. 
Although there's a pond here, the ground surrounding it is very dry. Trees and grass and dirt and other bushes scatter the ground, surrounding it like a wall. There's a large open space and then the water. And a log. A tree that had fallen over had become a home to bugs and squirrels, and now, a seat for me. I sit here sometimes, but I would rather sit in the soft grass, leaning against the huge tree.
I sit in the grass today. It hadn't rained in a while, so everything was nice and dry underneath me. I pull out my pencils and lay them neatly beside me in the grass, then take my sketchbook and place it in my lap, folded and closed. 
And then I breathe. In and out, deep, calming breaths. I let my mind slow, let my worries and anger fade away, only to be replaced by utter calmness.
When I open my eyes, I see a whole new world. The sky isn't as dark, the trees aren't as dead, the water is fresh and clean. Everything is just so much more... Alive. Everything is so beautiful.
This is why I like coming here. I can sit next to this old tree and be surrounded by nature for hours. Surrounded by the chirping birds and the bugs buzzing around me. The squirrels gathering nuts and the odd rabbit hopping around.
It's just so perfect here.
I open up my sketchbook, flipping through pages upon pages of my drawings until I get to the final three blank pages. I need a new sketchbook. I go through sketchbooks like they're going out of style.
Since I began drawing, I've gone through hundreds books, whether they be small little journals that will fit in my pocket, or bigger ones that I have to carry in a backpack... I go through a lot of sketchbooks. 
Danny always buys me new ones. She'll go to art stores and buy me the really good expensive ones with the good quality paper.
There's Danny again, always trying to make me happy.
I go through the pages in my current book, looking back on old drawings, old nightmares and visions. I see old women, young men... Children. Kids dying always made this worse. Watching them die at such a young age, watching their parents suffer. It's just heart-wrenching.
I see a drawing from last week. I had dreamed about this one. A young man had gone insane. He was in his early twenties, just finished college. He was going to be a lawyer.
Then one day, he simply went mad. He lost his mind. He took a gun in his pocket to the most populated area he could find and he started rounding off bullets, shooting everyone and everything in sight.
Police didn't hesitate to take him down.
That death takes place six years from now, and the man has no idea. The boy has no idea. Right now he's still just a teenager. Just a kid.
I turn the page, seeing lots of elderly people, lots of hospitals and sickness. I think they are the most peaceful, the natural ones. When people die from old age, at an old age, it makes this a little less hard. It's better to see people who have lived a long, loving life, to see them die simply because they are too old. It’s so much more peaceful than watching people being murdered or caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But unfortunately, the brutal ones are always the ones that stand out. Really, they’re the only ones that stand out.
I take my pencil in my hand, racking my brain for something to draw.
The pencil isn’t on the paper two seconds when I hear a loud tap.
I jump, the loudness foreign to my sanctuary. It’s always quiet here. Always.
I hear it again, from behind me this time. I peer around the tree trunk, searching for the source, but I see nothing. Just the familiar trees and rocks. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“A rabbit,” I whisper, coming to the conclusion that it must be a rabbit. Either that or a bird.
I got back to my sketchbook, pressing the graphite to the white paper, watching as the picture unfolds before be. But I can’t concentrate. Throughout the whole time I’m here, the tapping does not go away.
I refuse to look around anymore. I refuse to believe anything my mind was coming up with. Nobody was here. It was just me.
I convince myself I’m being paranoid. Today had me paranoid. Someone intruded at my table. Andrea had pushed me to the ground. Someone had touched my sketchbook, possibly even peered inside, into my world.
I was paranoid. Simple as that.