"Moms and dads were meant to love," I whispered to myself with a trembling jaw as I sat in the living room while my parents were yelling at each other in their room around the corner.  It started out as nothing a week ago, and it got so loud, so hard, so harsh.  I stopped paying attention to what they were saying on the third day and started looking out the window, just staring.  I'd been their practically the whole week, my mp3 player on my lap, buds in my ears, and no music playing.  I stared out the window at bugs, leaves, the sun, and clouds.  
There was a piece of paper and a pen by my feet that day that read "this is not how it should be."  A family wasn't supposed to be so dysfunctional, so decrepit and false on its basic being.  Moms and dads were meant to love.  Children were meant to laugh, but that's not how it was.  It used to be like that, just over a week ago.  Families shouldn't crumble in days.  What exactly happened?
My mother came out of the room and saw me sitting there.  As she came out and sat down beside me, she put her arm around me and asked, "what's the matter?" as she wiped a glistening tear off my face like there was nothing wrong before.
I opened my mouth a second to try to start, and I blinked my eyes to try and see through more and more tears as I looked out the window still at the clouds and the birds.
"Come on, it's alright.  What's wrong?"
I blinked again, looked down as if to check where I was with a tear falling to my pants, and pulled my earbuds out of my ears.  
"It's alright," I laughed slightly and mockingly, shaking my head.  "It's alright?"  I looked at my mother.  "It's alright?  What is wrong if it's alright?  Look at us!  We're broken!  We're pitiful!  Just look at us!  Is this how we're always going to be?  A shattered family with a lonely plea from each of us to reunite, a plea we'll never get?  You're broken and pitiful, and the mother I remembered you to be is growing old like a relic that I cherished in its prime.
"But what's worse is how broken I am.  While you two fight about whatever you really think will irk the other more, I'm sitting here among the shattered pieces of our family crying, crying for us to be what we were, praying in my tears for the fighting to end, and I'm afraid so much! of us going on like this until I leave or you both die.  I don't want to live in this broken sea of what used to be our family!  That's what's wrong!  Is that alright?"
My dad had been standing at the corner as I let off what I just said to my mother before I left her for my room, outside, my bike, the car, just somewhere.  He tried to stop me as I walked past him.  With his hand on my shoulder, I turned and looked at his unaffected face, then to his eyes, glassy, empty, sorrowful.  He saw the same in me and lifted his hand as if all he wanted to do was tell me, show me, that he felt the same.  
I didn't move when he let go and continued to stare at him, my jaw trembling more than it had the whole day.  With a deep breath that shook its way out of me, I slowly and deliberately rested my forehead on his shoulder, letting his shirt slowly pull my tears as they came.  As he put his arms around me and put his face in my hair as if to hide his own crying, my mother came over and put her arms around us both.
My staying showed I was sorry.  My dad's tears showed he was, too, and his embrace showed I was forgiven.  My mother's actions proved the same, and as I put my arms around them both, all I could do was breathe out a silent laugh and smile.