THE LEGACY OF SILENCE

The silence did not begin with me

To my sons, you who never received the whole story.

Just as I, my father and my grandmother never received the whole of ours.

There are moments that etch themselves into the body rather than the

memory. In the summer of 1970 I am standing in the schoolyard in Hageby.

The asphalt is warm; the smell of dust and grass hangs heavy in the air. I

am eighteen. She is seventeen. We stand side by side, yet the distance

between us already feels insurmountable.