“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
in so many ways, winter is coming..
A fifteen year old girl killed her caregiver some days ago...
I woke to the news and the first thing that struck me was, "It could have been me"
It's getting cold here. The darkness settles around the houses while almost an unseen sun descends behind the hillside in Oslo city already at four o'clock. The cold has forced the winter jackets from the unlocked storage room in the basement. The dinners have changed from salads to soup. The people walk by my apartment window looking paler each day. The news has remained with me ever since it carved itself into my web of thoughts that morning. "It could have been me"
She lived on a institution outside town, certainly with several other children and some caregivers who came and went after internship. She certainly had friends, a few, but someone she cared about and someone who cared about her. It was in the night it happened, and we, at a distance is reading the news, and do not know how or who she was. She is like a shadow, unknown to most people who grow up in Norway. A child without parents. Without anyone caring for her life, is maybe more correct. If her parents live, who knows, any of us could only guess. Many of us like standing outside, looking under a pile of paperwork and bureaucracy. See a sliver of a story as thick as a five hundred year old tree. Thats maybe why we read the news. But if only someone can really know how it is to be her at this time.. Surrounded by even more unknown people than before. Maybe she has been in the system to long. Maybe she has just come in, only been there a year, without a foster home that can take her.
Few people know about my past or who I am today. I work alone and have little social life to brag of. I do care greatly about the things I do and do not take lightly to detail and compassion. I think it is a hard cold country that has frozen thicker and thicker with ice up to the present day, and I see more and more people falling trough around me. I realize how good we have it in this small country. But the familiar shadows of my own past grows ever larger, in society, outlying roads and dust bunnies are growing cancer hazard and other hooks, while I sit and feel lucky to live here. I look past so much every day now, but this I could not miss: A fifteen year old girl. Her life has not begun yet. Her future has gone down the drain and the beautiful rich Norway will drown with her, in an ever faster loop down the same drain.
A fifteen year old girl is not responsible for anything. She should not have to think about anything other than her first love, her first grades of high school, her first trip abroad alone, her first drive with an E in the window. Her first dream. Her first pair of jeans to 1500 NOK which she will keep for ten years to come. Her feelings and fantasies should not be separated from the reality in such a painful and brutal way.
It went too far for her, this beautiful girl, and it's not her fault. It is no one's. But someone should take responsibility, and this is my contribution:
I have been in many homes during the years .. Some more and some less, all under the same organization. An organization hired by Norway's child protection which again is state operated. Some places have follow-ups of children in better ways than others, but there is one thing they all have in common. It is work, a job one should leave behind when going home, which many do, and it is not, and will never be a home of that cause itself. It has strange visitors during the night. Some of them even do not know how to deal. It lacks so much except strangers. Maybe it has a TV and entertainment games, a bed ready and changed, and a big kitchen. It is many bedrooms and even the other kids are strangers. And something most people even those who work there or the child itself do not think about; It is probably far, far away from school, family and friends. Everything can and will get torn apart, and there are to many places to escape reality. It feels, after all, not real in itself.
So many circumstances one do not realize until it is too late. So much anger and loneliness, one loses energy by discouraging events. Suddenly life becomes so insignificant. Because no one really cares. Not in the way you need anyway. I know I could have been her. Me with my anger could have killed at that time. Like a animal torn away from its group, scared and lonely.
Maybe this is her doing, but it is not and never will be her fault. I love her, cause she is my sister in so many ways.
- Blix 2014
FOTO: ØYVIND BYE SKILLE / NRK
http://www.nrk.no/ostlandssendingen/15-ar-gammel-jente-siktet-for-drap-1.12010524
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