THE LEGACY OF SILENCE by Thomas Virro

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.