Not getting an apprenticeship, sitting around in government agencies and applying for welfare benefits, getting no benefits because some document or other is missing; coming home to find her mother has hung herself, leaving the apartment, landing in some kind of shelter for young women, getting pregnant, getting beat up by someone for getting pregnant, giving up the baby for adoption, or not, it didn’t matter. She’d wait for an apartment in a social housing complex, start to drink and smoke crack and watch TV, staring at other people’s pseudo lives, aka life as it’s supposed to be. Light-skinned people who drink tea in their gardens and do honest work with their skillful hands. They fall in love, the people on TV. And then comes: fucking violin music.

In Don’s world nobody fell in love. The people in her city hated each other or clung to each other because of a sense of panic they all felt, though nobody could say where it came from, this unease. They had apartments after all. Most of them. They had food. A kind of food.

Don read a lot, understood little, but still far more than an adult would think possible of a so-called child. Don felt:

Rage.

Are you serious? This pile of shit that you plunked down here? “Watch it! That’s what’s left. It might not be great, but it’s yours. This is the earth that we’ve eaten bare, this is your neighborhood, your city, which serves the purpose of housing workers so they can produce some useless shit that nobody needs. Got it? It doesn’t require anything of the people in your city except to vote for right-wing nationalist idiots who always have an answer to the question of who is to blame.”

When people know who’s to blame, they feel better, because then divine justice is restored. And there’s a target for their hate. In Don’s city you hated foreigners. Period. Don’s city, that she would never leave, where she would waste away her entire life. Where it would end, though actually it was already over even before it began, because she was born in the wrong place. To the wrong parents, and on top of it all the weather was wretched. Had anyone asked her? Had anyone asked her to take part in these proceedings, run according to rules she had no say in? What human obligation was she fulfilling with her stay here, shitting among the eight billion people—or, by the time the thought was finished, perhaps it was nine billion—who were crawling around looking to see if they could conjure up some sort of advantage somehow. Who all wanted—something.

Life was a gift.