Remembering fallen comrades
Remembering fallen comrades
By the time Alexandra Flodman was declared the winner of Aftonbladet's young women's short-story competition she had already committed suicide.
Anyone who sets up at or reads widely in Diaryland will know the rest of the story only too well: the withdrawal from school-work and friends; the self-inflicted cuts on her arms; the half-hearted suicide attempts; the writing - endless stories and poems and diaries; the hospitalisation; the halfway-house.
And in this case, most heartbreaking of all, the apparent remission. Heartbreaking because, with hindsight, it's clear that she had made up her mind to die and that her cheerful disposition and the quality time she spent with friends and family was her way of trying to soften the blow.
Lots of people suffer from teenage angst and not all of them make it through to the other side. Maybe those of us who did should stop, from time to time, to honour our fallen dead.
Alexandra's family are seeking to publish her stories and poems (but not, of course, her diaries) posthumously. They were meant to be read, they figure. The article closes with one of her poems:
Det ingen f�rst�r
det ingen vet
det �r min egen hemlighet.
F�r om ingen f�rst�r
�r det ingens som vet
att det finns n�gon hemlighet.
And in a futile attempt to mitigate an obscure sense of guilt at being part of a universe that wasn't - and perhaps never could have been - kind and gentle enough for her, and because not everyone reads Swedish, I've tried to translate it:
Nobody knows -
And no-one suspects -
That I'm hiding a secret inside.
Since if no-one suspects
Then there's no-one who knows
That there's even a secret to hide.
She probably deserves a better translator, and maybe she'll get one.
But maybe she'll find out
posthumously what the rest of us learned to stay alive - that
sometimes you have to settle for what you can get.