LINOLEUM
The cold linoleum sends chills through my body while my back is perched against the metal frame of my bed. The bed’s fine, though the blanket’s not one for autumn. This time I have a different room; a wardrobe without shelves and the bed are the only things here. It’s bigger size makes it feel even more empty.
I’m at the youth shelter, again. Last time I was thirteen, I’m fourteen now.
I am back to where I started and where no one quite knows what to do with me, not unlike the foster family I stayed with until they asked me to leave. We had different views on life.
Like everybody else, I also don’t know what to do with me. The opportunities of this room are very little. Nothing to tie a sheet from and plunging from the ground floor seems futile. I could run into the brick wall of my room yet that too is unlikely to bring the end. I just sit on the floor instead.
I don’t know if I feel nothing or everything. I am not sure it matters.
The other kids have their own stories. They’re all different and much the same. Some are fresh faces, others hardened through years in the system.
We carry trauma, fear and scars. One kid has a big cut on their face and is bullied for it at school. Once I got suspended for staying away from gym classes. Whatever parts of ourselves we may or may not show, no one bares their soul. We can’t. We all hide the scars we can.
Instead we’re tough. The youngest kid here is 12 and burned off their eyebrows right in front of us, just for the joke. The oldest, who will age out of here, got into a fight with a swan that wandered into the garden, just for the joke. The swan didn’t think it funny and proved as tough as us. If you want to fight stick to humans; that was the lesson that day.
In the morning we walk to the bus stop together, though we all step on different buses and travel to different schools. When we return no one asks what we learned that day. We’re in survival mode only and everyone knows it.
Still, we learn. These lessons will prove useful later in life but won’t bring us closer to a diploma. Often we are not even qualified to work in the places that once controlled our lives. Being streetwise sparks little admiration, hardly ever brings in the money. At least our exteriors can’t be easily broken.
You’re supposed to stay here for only three months, though they can add another three. If the world can’t offer you safe harbour, here is where you linger.
Still, even without solutions you are to pack your bag, if you have one, and leave after those three months and three more come to an end.
Your room is disinfected and it never takes more than a few hours for the next kid to arrive, for that distinct scent to nestle in their memory forever.
We know the next place can be much worse or, if we’re lucky, just not quite right.
An honest conversation on a Sunday evening can cause your social worker to pick you up Monday afternoon.
They gave me a teddy bear and thirty minutes to pack my clothes.
I liked it there, with the foster family. It was never supposed to be permanent, just three months and maybe another three. In the end, I stayed there just under two. On our way back to the shelter my social worker explained my now-former foster family was afraid I might kill myself. I had been too honest. I wanted to die right there and then.
Life now came in three month increments, sometimes less. It wasn’t about the end of the school year, for the holidays to arrive or the next birthday. It was about surviving a few months, or hoping not to, while not knowing what comes next.
Despite the terrifying years before my first time at the shelter, I think it was here where stress and fear took up permanent residence in my body, for time to become a perpetual enemy.
With a childhood carved into my body I am not sure I ever fully escaped my parents, but the system has fused itself firmly with my bones. There’s just no escaping that.
Thinking back, I struggle to put together the timeline of my teenage years. I remember moments, incidents, but everything else is marred by the overwhelmingness of it all. At some point I turned 18, to tell the story of how I got there I have to use methodology rather than memory.
I still remember the hugs I wanted but pushed away. The laughter that escaped me though I no longer know why. Staff who cared but never quite understood my words. Dancing to gabber. My fear at seeing fire, despite it being eyebrows only. Learning how to roll cigarettes and being embarrassed for just not getting it right. The fear on all our faces. The swan crashing into a quickly closed door. Our miraculous resilience. The eventual recognition we were the ones paying the price. Not knowing how to survive yet still doing it.
My bones don’t like the linoleum. I never make it to bed that night.