В колонках играет - The Vaselines
Настроение сейчас - Teenage Superstars

When I was fourteen, I promised myself that I would never allow myself to be abandoned by anyone else ever again. The promise, I scribbled in my notebook of thoughts and lyrics, saying, "I will not be the one with the most to lose, if ever they leave me like my father does over and over. I will not be the one with the most to lose tonight or any other night in the future."

I've lost and I've loved, and relished every ounce of the pain because with the pain came a primal understanding of the animal-self beyond the thinking-self. Animal-self acted in passion and hunting for survival; thinking-self rationalised and studied as a way to discover survival.

Once I met someone who had never had anyone tell him they loved him. He weighed well over two hundred pounds and he was over six feet tall. He used double negatives and taught me how to throw a punch. See, you have to slide a little and then lean into it, so you're hitting with your body not just your arm. He never called me "skeleton" or said I looked like a girl, like the others did. He showed me how to make liquor from apples in case I ever went to prison, that some drugs are made in bathtubs, and he would smuggle in cigarettes taped to his dick everytime he ran away and give them to me. I was the first person in his life who had ever said I love you. When I said it, it was the first time since he was a child that he had cried.

The first time I met him I was supposed to be sleeping on a mattress in the hallway, they had run out of beds and Ville needed one more than I did, so I'd ended up there. He was brought in by two cops, his ankles shackled and his hands cuffed behind him. When they unlocked him, he ran up and down the hallway screaming. Each time he reached the end of the hallway, he would slap the walls with his palms like an animal in a cage. This was a different sort of zoo, I realised then. Not a hospital or a prison, but a place where you went when you were a kid and no one wanted you for one reason or another.

A girl, Ruusu, was fourteen, the same as me. They would send her to the quiet room because she would scream because she hated her stepfather. When she would get in the room, I could hear her singing. This was my lullaby. They eventually took her someplace else, I'm not sure where, but on the way out she gave me her wristwatch. Time, she said, doesn't matter here. It's all the same.

That was never true for me, thanks to my mummu, grandmother for anyone who might not know. She couldn't take us, but she loved us and we knew it. i knew it. I knew she loved us and she did everything she could for us. She came and she smiled and she laughed. I could call her anytime. My father brought me a guitar, but she kept me alive and made me someone who wanted to play it. Everything I know about love, I learned from her. She was and still is a miracle.

It was almost Halloween that first year,and I pretended I was still home to everyone I knew, making the possibility of very close friendships at school, minimal to none.

We had a Halloween party, at the orphanage and I was allowed to wear make up. They gave us finger-paints, and on the windows that overlooked the courtyard we painted pumpkins and autumn leaves. It was Halloween, and we could have punch and cookies and pretend to be who we really were. Ville drew hearts, I painted music notes and wrote all the words to my favourite song of the moment. An anorexic painted a skeleton on the far left panel. The girl who sang hymns in her room every night carefully painted crosses on tombstones. She had buried something her religion disallowed. One painted cobwebs. He had been there for a long time. We all painted ghosts. Our bodies were trapped. We were free.

The next morning, the windows revealed the world again, the oak tree surrounded by brick walls that barely offered the light of the sun. On the ground was a thin veil of white, a whisper as if something long dead had been resurrected, the thin skin of a ghost, hope.