I look upon them now in the reflection of the dining room window. Their image, though slightly distorted, obtains a distinct acuteness in the incisive replication of their physical appearance on cold glass of the window pane. Amidst a background of black, they shiver with uncontrollable laughter. Snickering, smiling, smirking at some pun, I watch them from across the table. The words have long lost their meaning as I slowly slip into a more comfortable style of listening. I dip my feet into a pool of partial consciousness. The topic has changed now, something more serious, maybe something personal, or perhaps something philosophical, or maybe just debatable. The conversation can be understood in just one look at their eyes, brooding with intensity. A mist of tears condenses in the corners of my brother’s eyes, not of sorrow but of frustration. Soon someone gets up and a chair shrieks a cry of resistance at the suffocating silence. Suddenly, new centers of gravities form on the white ceramic plates sitting innocently on the pine tabletop and everyone’s gaze is pulled into a mass of mashed potatoes. Everyone sits again, awkward and in silence until someone glances my way. “Nolwenn…Nolwenn! You really lose yourself in your own world. Are you an alien or what?!” Interpelled, I look up abruptly, blink a couple times, trying to find the right frequency in the midst of a blizzard of static. Still disoriented, I manage a confused “What?” and the laughing starts again.

My family in a nut shell is all love, all hate, all fun and games, all struggle and strife. Personality after personality battling with incessant determination, we manage to survive. But despite all the bickering and the quarrels we all know that the animosity is superficial; it is another one of our games. In my family we each have our own roles, mine might be called clueless. Others possess more aggressive personalities and therefore play more forceful characters. Like the seven dwarfs we have our own adjectives; in our family we have Right, Wrong, Quiet, Clueless, Anxious, and Mini.