A girl in my neighbourhood gave birth about a week ago. She’s 12 years old. There are 15 people living in her 3 bedroom house. It’s filthy and there are now 3 young children there. Today the 12 year old mother’s mother got arrested for possession of drugs. There are still a lot of addicts living in that house.
For a reason I don’t know, Social Services haven’t got involved. It’s ridiculous. There is a twelve year old trying to look after baby amongst a houseful of drug addicts, alcoholics and lazy, unemployed adults who aren’t much more capable of looking after children themselves. To be quite honest, it makes me hate the way things are run around here. There was a gun scare at my school on Friday, and an old friend has apparently committed suicide.
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It’s all a little surreal. Just-turned-teens having kids, guns, suicide. They’re all things I thought I would never come across. You see things on the news and hear stories, but there’s a little part that says “don’t listen, it’s the media” and you go on with your life thinking these things are just anomalies. Shocking, yes, but rare and unlikely. It’s starting to dawn on me that whilst there are still trees that look beautiful at sunset and fields that haven’t been cut for decades and all manner of beautiful things, the world can be dark. It can be scary, and there are a great many things in it that contain no beauty at all, no matter how hard you search for something good in a bad situation.
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This also leads me on to saying that I’ve been fifteen years of age for well over a month now. I’ve seen more unpleasant things in the last few weeks than I can remember, and it makes me wonder if they were always there and I just never noticed because I was lost in my own childish world. I can’t stop myself from growing up, but I won’t forget how to have fun. I won’t forget that when making an outfit for a child’s art project you can put the sheet over yourself and run around making ghost noises for a good ten minutes. I’ll keep myself aware of war and poverty and terrible things like the Haitian earthquake, but twenty years from now I’ll still be able to look at a tree without thinking of a table.
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I won’t forget fun.
Gadgical 