Shadows matter

0.

Love untold.

Worth not embodied.

On the whole difficult to capture in a photograph.

1.

Those who were once not loved. 

Children who were not made to feel valuable. 

Who do we become?

Do we still hide behind sofas in the shadow?

Are the sofas expensive?

Or are they as torn as our memories? 

2.

By an ordinary road between the shopping centre and the kitchen table lie dead animals. If they end up in the middle of the road they are soon moved to the side. Moved into the ditch.

3.

The man who has taken these photogrpahs said to me: My story is not particularly special. He said: I don’t want this to be too much about me. He said: The relevance is that others have experienced something similar

Is this true for me? That what I reveal about myself has to be of value for someone else, otherwise I have no right, absolutely no right to talk about my life. For the story of the hidden child cannot have any value in itself?

Hiding behind a sofa is one thing. A relatively easy thing if you compare with what comes later. Stepping out again.

Hi, here I stand, the child I was with fear sticking in my throat. What’s for dinner? 

The years pass.

One bears one’s thorns under one’s hat.

4.

The years pass and we learn to eat our dinner in front of the sofa instead of behind it.

We who appear to be entirely normal.

That pleases the others.

The others don’t want to eat dinner behind sofas. 

They want to have a nice time. 

We know that they deserve it. 

So we have made an effort. 

We don’t want to trouble them with the things that almost destroyed us, no we don’t want that. 

For we survived. We are sitting here.

Or not. 

Some of us are still sitting behind the sofa in the shadow. 

Some of us can hardly smile without feeling occupied by alien powers. Fraudulent.

Some of us have to do our best, to furnish a home in the ditch.

Some of us have to remain in the exclusion we were banished to long ago.

Decorate with rag rugs in the mud as best as we can.

5.

You should love children. Easy to agree.

Still, not all are loved.

For how does one love who has not been loved?

How does one get oneself out of the ditch?

How does one give away something that one never had?

How does one shed one’s skin?

Most of us want to remember our parents in sunshine. 

We don’t want to remember them with hands armed with bad weather.

Parents should tell you that monsters don’t exist.

Not confirm the opposite every weekend.

Parents should protect their children against monsters. 

Not be one themselves.

There are those who look towards the cot and smile, become warm at heart, but in the next instance they notice that they’re not alone. Right behind them stand generations of tense darkness. An inherited steel deep in their heart.

There are people whose bodies are filled with vulcano, but who were never taught the art of holding a match.

6.

We who carry wounds, we are the majority. 

We who carry scars and inner clouds throughout summer. 

Were will we go with our wounds? 

There were those who pointed out: what you most of all needed was the scariest person you knew.

What you needed to survive, was the monster. 

I have a friend who comes from another country. The country is full of war. That’s why he was given asylum. The bullets whined above the playground. But the worst was not the war, he says.

The worst was his own dad.

I asked: But do remember any sunny days from your childhood?

He replied: Good days? Of course there were some! Those were the days when my dad was too tired to beat me.

7. 

Statistics. There are more adults than there is adultness. There are many forms of violence. It would be simplistic to believe that all involve hard hands. There are numbers that chafe. Every day, four adults go on sick leave because of bullying. It takes on average five years before they can go back to work. There is a mathematics of fragility. Psychiatric medications turn over as much as the illegal drugs market. Perhaps the difference lies not in what they relieve, but only where you buy them. The chemist as a Sergel’s Square with strip lights and office hours. Signs that the ditch is wider than we think.

Studies show that under our hats we all have brains. Studies show that these brains react — exactly as much, and exactly in the same places — to a harsh word as to a hard slap. This may sound strange. Can’t be true? But what would hurt most? That the one you love kicks your shin. Or that the one you love tells you that you’re a disgusting creep?

You only kick your collague’s leg once. Then you’re out. How many hard words does it take before someone calls the union? How much violence is contained in a cold word? We’ve stopped hitting people when we’re angry. But what do we say? How do we joke?  

What world do we create with our mouths? 

How many imaginary sofas are there in an ordinary coffee room? 

No one has ended up behind the sofa for fun.

Violence cannot always be captured in a photograph.