30/07/25

Last night has to have been the easiest I've fallen asleep the night before a birthday. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it just means that I’ve grown up. With more growth comes more responsibility, and you never stop growing, so why get sad over the complete non-excitement before a birthday? 17 years of birthdays, 16 long winters without any sun. With snowstorms, broken radiators, and an intense yearning for the sun. You probably don’t understand how beautiful it is when the sun comes up in February—almost half a year in complete darkness—when you start worrying it might not come. One day, through the clouds, you will feel the sunrays; the vitamins you’ve been taking pills for become redundant. The snow is still there, though. However, you start walking knee-deep in snow, more proud and hopeful than ever. And then comes summer. Until last year, it was the only time when you could fully relax for a month or two before school starts again. Where you could stay outside until… the sun was still up. Haha, here in Greenland in the summer, the sun always shines, though most of the time it’s obscured by clouds or by the heavy fog that always seems to come back. With summer comes my birthday, near the end of the season—the thirty-first of July. I’ve always been jealous of those who had their birthdays at other times of the year because, when you’re at school, one day some other kid has a birthday, and they always have the whole class singing happy birthday to them, and oftentimes there’s cake involved too. I’ve never had that—only the birthday parties I’ve always been too embarrassed to invite my friends to because I didn’t feel like they belonged in my personal life like that. Only the adults and their children came to those parties, and their children were often too young or too weird for me to know them. So sometimes I hid in my room or in the boiler room to stay away from the awkward adults who had randomly come to my birthday parties. They probably thought I was weird too. Birthday boy hanging out in the boiler room away from everyone else—but honestly, I never cared about that. I’m happy they came, though; we both mutually agree on one thing—that the other one is weird. I’ve grown weary of my birthdays. Not because I’m getting older, or that I’m receiving fewer gifts, or that there are fewer visitors coming because of my age—but because they feel so hollow now. Before, it was this big thing where my parents, grandparents, and my brothers would sneak into my room and wake me up with a birthday song, and usually I’d receive a new phone each year because I had broken it three months prior. Then I would walk over to the table and eat the glorious cake they had made for my birthday and really smile. I say really because the smile now is one of those where the eye isn’t involved, and it lasts less than a second before I look away. They don’t even sit at the table with me anymore. At most, they say congratulations and leave. Responsibility—where was I? I have grown much this past year, as I’ve been going to efterskole, finding what I thought was true love two times, the latter more impactful—and still is today. We had been together for about six months in total, the first three not being anything official, but I saw it: the sparks, the future, and the brain chemistry. We started in late October and ended things on the 30th of April. We had a nice relationship. Though what happened in early January changed me forever. I was staying at my mom’s house for the winter break, from mid-December to early January. It was fine at first; I had my small amount of weed, and she had her alcohol. It was fine for a couple of days—until the twenty-fourth of December, when I was awoken in the middle of the night by screaming, maybe at 3 a.m. My mother and her boyfriend were arguing about something small. I told them to stop at one point because I wanted to sleep, but they kept screaming at each other for half an hour or so, until her boyfriend finally left and let me sleep peacefully for the next few hours. Christmas Day, I got some trashy scooter gang clothes from my mother, and from myself, some more weed. I finally had the time to smoke some—and smoke I did. I made the perfect joint, smoked it outside my mom’s house, and eventually got tired of smoking the thing. So I hit the bed and watched TikTok for an hour or so. Then something terrible happened. My dad called. Video called. Fuck. My eyes were red, my voice was deep, and I was zoned out. I answered the phone, tried to open my eyes as much as I could, and started talking. He said the usual, like “Merry Christmas,” and that my stepmom and sister said hi. I looked at myself in the top right corner of the video call almost the entire time. I was mesmerized. I looked like my brother every time he would video call. He had the low eyes, low voice, and even looked spaced out—and he was always smiling. Then it struck me: he was high every time we went on video call. Anyhow, the video chat ended, and I got less high and fell asleep early, with the girl I was talking about earlier on video call. The night of the twenty-sixth—I don’t remember that night. All I know is that I had gone to my friend’s house in another city and would stay there for almost the rest of the break. Every day we got high together. It became a routine. Wake up, and get baked. Call her for a couple of minutes each night, occasionally fall asleep on video call. And then suddenly, one day, my friend’s mom kicked me out. I had stayed there for too long—maybe six or seven days. She had grown tired of cooking for five. Understandable enough, but I had to go back to my mom’s house. I said my goodbyes to my friends, conveniently left before I could say goodbye to my friend’s mom, and returned. It was fine. The arguments had cooled down; I could sleep that night. The next day—it was the fourth of January. It started off fine. I woke up, got baked, and crashed on the bed until the high wore off. Then I noticed that my weed had run out. I started panicking and went immediately over to my smoking area and found little crumbles of weed on the floor. After about thirty minutes, and my mom interrupting suddenly, I had gathered enough to smoke. I didn’t have any more papers on me, so I had to smoke from my pipe. I put in the last bit of tobacco I had with the last bit of weed I had, then started smoking. I stayed up late that night until around eleven, when I got too tired and annoyed at TikTok for being too boring. The first two hours of sleep were fine, I assume—I don’t remember. But at 1 a.m. that night, I heard a loud argument between my mom and her boyfriend, eventually leading to him strangling her. I admit I was a coward there, because I couldn’t find the courage to stop them. After about ten seconds, my mom weakly, with no air left, said “stop,” and he finally did. I felt safe enough to crawl into bed again, though my heart was still pumping—I couldn’t sleep. Then the argument started again, worse than last time. Things were flying around, and they were now screaming. I finally got the courage to ask what was happening, and my mom started explaining that he thought she had cheated on him with a guy that gave her cocaine. And he started explaining why he thought that—because she was out until late in the morning, and she should have come home when the guy made a move on her. She told him she did, and the argument started again. I told them to stop, and the boyfriend left. Finally, some quiet, I thought. I don’t know what she was high on, but at one moment I saw her with cocaine, hiding it from her boyfriend. She also had a half-full bottle of vodka, and she was talking about heroin. I calmed her down for the next few hours, but at one point she started crying. I don’t remember why. I think she felt bad that she was such a terrible mother to me. That’s what I hope she was crying about. At one point, she looked at me in such a traumatic way that it’s still burned into my head and has given me many flashbacks to this day. And oh God, her cry—it was the deepest, most agonizing cry I’ve ever heard. My brain ejected the reason why she was crying, though. I wasn’t high anymore, and all I had was half a cigarette, which I smoked half an hour ago. Then she started acting erratic. She suddenly remembered her boyfriend and began getting angry again. She knew where he was hiding. She suddenly stood up and ran over to that house where she thought he was hiding. I was confused at first—she said something before leaving that was completely illegible. But then I started worrying after about thirty seconds and started to look for her. All around me was completely empty. When I looked around me, all the apartments looked empty and quiet—it was late at night, after all. I started walking around the apartments until I could hear noise. “HES NOT HERE. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE!” The apartment owner shouted that at my mom for a while Then I heard screaming from my mother, demanding that she knew he was there. And after building up a bit of courage, I slammed open the door—slightly hitting my mom—and grabbed her and shoved her out of that apartment. Suddenly, her anger was gone, and she went completely quiet and silently walked with me as I told her how much of an idiot she was, and told her to never do that again. I think I was on video call with my brother. I had been for a while now, since the boyfriend was at my mom’s, and he had grown completely worried for her, while I had to go deal with all of this. When we got back, I went into my room and found that I had forgotten that my brother was on the phone. I started talking to him, explaining what had happened in the last twenty minutes. I went into the living room and found my mom silently sitting on her sofa. I sat beside her and checked the next bus, which was at four a.m.—still thirty minutes to go. I forgot to mention this, but I had been consistently checking the time. From one a.m. to four a.m., to see when the next bus was leaving. I noticed that my mom was growing erratic again and asked if she was okay. She stood up and started talking to herself, walking around the apartment erratically. I asked her what she was looking for. She said she knew he had hidden some amount of heroin in the house somewhere. My brother realized immediately that she was tweaking. After sitting for a while, telling her to stop and come back, I became bored and began packing my things. I had my guitar and two suitcases with me. It was a big amount of luggage to pack. After about five minutes of packing, it became too much for me, and I sat on the edge of her mattress crying, while she was still searching for her heroin. She didn’t stop when I started crying. Oh God, I have really lost her. My whole childhood she was gone, but there was an image of her. Now it’s gone. I started crying more. I decided I had enough when my mom seemingly found her stuff, and locked herself in the kitchen and became quiet, so I left. I didn’t care about what had been left at her house. I didn’t care how long I had to wait for the bus. I didn’t care. The whole two-hour trip back to my friend’s house was a constant battle to stop the crying, and ended in me staring at a spot on the train for an hour. I noticed there was this elderly lady sitting opposite me. I kept hoping that she would ask me what happened and if I was okay. All she did was just look at me occasionally. Then I realized: I’m not a child anymore. People don’t care anymore, and I have to accept that. It took a while for me to not get panic attacks when my mom called. I had blocked her on everything. Still, one day she found my school’s phone number and asked if the teacher could give me the phone for her. She started talking like normal. She asked me to unblock her. I said maybe and started trying to hold back my tears. My heart was beating—I hadn’t heard from her in three months. One part of me hoped she had forgotten me. But she lingers like a parasite. She eats you when you least expect it. And you have to accept it. The teacher asked me if I was okay after the phone call. I started crying hard, and she told me to come with her to the office. I explained everything to her, as I have to you now. I worried that I made her scared to be a mother, because she was pregnant at the time. I hope I didn’t, because I know she shouldn’t be. I was never the same after that night on the fifth of January. My relationship dwindled for the next couple of months. Two weeks after what happened with my mom, I asked her to be my girlfriend. The next morning, she said yes. It felt weirdly dull to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Of course I was happy, but something in me had already gone somewhere else. I kept seeing my mom’s face when she cried. A few months went by, and whenever my girlfriend wasn’t near me, I got nervous. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. The morning after I watched Nowhere from 1997, I broke up with her. I said that if we kept going, we would end up hating each other. I didn’t know the irony until a week later, when I made the mistake of getting too close with our mutual friend, who was close friends with both of us. I had an endless list of excuses—that made me do things without really thinking. In the last thirty days or so of efterskole I tried mending our relationship to where we could stand each other's presence. We had it all by that point. Some days we would sit by each other and watch the sun set, the next day we would be arguing again. My favourite day there, was the day we carved Halloween pumpkins together. We were still getting used to each other, each day was new. And something about her was magical that evening. they hated me. Now I hope they have forgotten me. I can’t make it up to them, and some day I will have to accept that. I learned a lot from that experience. A month left of school and everyone hates you. Nothing really makes you grow like that. Today is my birthday, and I don't care. I have myself. Start there.