The Truth About Life

-Audrey: Chapter Twenty-Eight-

I lie in bed wide awake, it’s the middle of the night. This is what I do most nights now, I stare, wide-eyed at my bedroom ceiling.

Chase has been gone, or missing for almost five months now.

Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s all passed in a blur of despair.

Spring is pushing its way through, while I feel like I’m in limbo. The grass is starting to turn a soft, beautiful green, the trees have tight buds ready to burst forth. The world and Mother Nature are moving forward, but I can’t seem to.

My mom on the other hand is becoming this fierce warrior, it seems. She’s been going with Megan Scott to the abuse support group every other week, volunteering at the homeless shelter.

She wakes before dawn, baking, painting or sculpting something. 
The kitchen is now the multi-purpose room. The table holding paint, clay, stacked up baking pans, and it's the base for our search for Chase.

We have city and state maps flattened out over the dining table. They're covered in highlighted sections, places like hospitals, police stations and homeless shelters that we’ve gotten in contact with.

We have no new information on Chase. He has simply vanished.

I’m graduating in two months, what do I do? Move on with my life and start college, or stay put and continue helping to locate Chase, who, it seems, doesn't want to be found.

I don’t know what to do. I’m feeling lost and completely alone. Chase is gone, my dad comes on weekends pretty much only to search for Chase, so I really don’t see him, not really.
My mom is busy…… just crazy busy, doing what she needs to do to keep sane.

And Benson. We’ve grown incredibly close this past year. He’s the one, he’s my person. But he’s decided to go on a service building mission. Which is completely amazing.

His dad is a successful builder, with Benson apprenticing for him every summer growing up and still does on the weekends.

Benson has been taking any and all architecture courses through high school and even online. He's an incredibly talented architect; he has a notebook full of his ideas all sketched beautifully out.

There are park, house, cabin and condo designs. Company designs for office buildings with modern, sleek lines, but always with a natural edge. Most of Benson's building sketches have rooftop gardens. Trees and flowers would bloom in abundance.

But in the very back of his notebook, there's  a project close to his heart: The Haiti Project, is what it’s called.

These pages are filled with sketches of schools, built to withstand earthquakes. The plans have dorm rooms for students and teachers to sleep in case of natural disasters happening, keeping them from their homes and families.

There are built in bunk beds sketched in, bathrooms, a kitchen, and of course classrooms.

His dream is to be able to fill these classrooms with laptops, textbooks, books on every subject, whiteboards, notebooks, pencils, markers, paint, crayons. Everything we had available to us growing up.

Benson is an incredibly kind, giving human being. His generosity, love and acceptance for everyone is why I’ve fallen head over heels in love with him.

Yup, you heard that right. I love Benson Scott. Shhhh, don’t tell him. I still haven’t. I’ve wanted to tell him so many times over the last few months, but the timing was never right.

Then when he told me he was making the trip to Haiti after graduation, I knew I couldn't say anything at all.
I know he needs this trip, to pave his own path.