Today, when I am destroyed by the shock seeing the intolerance in our world…Today, when being hateful, exclusionary, and ignorant and not understanding one another is almost praised and being different or weak is punished. Today, when every other week I get disappointed in the world’s rightfulness, meanwhile I am preaching about acceptance, social sensitivity and being open-minded, as if I know exactly what the right thing is. Today, when I slowly but surely start to believe that I am more sensitive and empathic then most of my friends…Today, Linda’s frail figure emerges from my memories. She is not speaking, she is not approaching us, she is not interested, not anymore.

She is just standing there, in the distance, we are not including her in our games, we are not letting her in. She is just standing there awkwardly, with pain in her eyes and you just cannot take your eyes off her.

I did not think about Linda for maybe 15 years. We were in elementary school and all of us lived in the same neighborhood; - we took for granted the treasure that we had, our health. Young, old, rich, poor, sometimes these labels were important, but at the end of the day we were a team on the playground. We took over every green area of the vicinity, we came up with stories and played whatever we wanted to play.

We did not even realize how special it was to be a part of community.

Linda was the counterpoint.

Looking back, she was a remarkably pretty girl. She had light blue eyes, her dirty blonde hair was always in a high ponytail, her face was nice, but some sort of disorder was visible. She was older than the rest of us, yet she appeared younger than us. Because of her behavior and the way, she talked, we thought about her as a baby. I think we saw her through old glasses because she was different, weird, and annoying. We could not understand her.

Nobody knows who started to bully her first, and we will never find out the reason why.

One of my first memories about her was when she was approaching us and somebody whispered to my ears: This is Linda, she is sick, she poops herself. Linda says hi to us and asks what we are playing, she is trying to join us. My playmate angrily yells at her and Linda starts to cry inconsolably, she bites her fist, and walks away while she is still weeping. The bitemarks are permanent on her fist.

We never found out what happened to Linda, what type of trauma she endured and when. Some said that her mom took strong medications when she was pregnant with her and that is why she turned out this way. Her healthy brothers showed tender affection towards their little sister, but they were not with her all the time. Back in those days, we did not have development centers for children with special needs in my hometown, thus Linda wandered a lot in the garden by herself. No matter how hard I try to remember those days, I cannot remember a time when one of us turned to Linda with love and kindness.

We never let her play with us, and we never let her in, in fact we did everything to chase her away. We made fun of her, we said hateful things to her, we made her to do very humiliating tasks. We as the healthy ones, the ‘normal’ ones.

Linda had meltdowns many times, cried and bit her fist because of us. I never bullied her, but my silence and my approval of the cruelty made me responsible for her pain. None of us stood up for her and spoke up against the bullying and stigmatization of a little girl. Nobody protected her. It seemed like none of us felt ashamed because of what we were doing to her.

According to the cruel morals of the group, Linda was hateful, because she was different. Because she was impaired, grimy and she smelled. We did not care that it was not her fault, even though we were old enough to understand that.

Our parents probably had no idea what we were doing in the backyard, however, I recall that Linda’s mom gave us lectures a few times, but we did not take it seriously.

Years passed and Linda and her family moved away from the neighborhood.

 We did not hear from her again, until years later, we were in junior high at that time, and somebody put an obituary on the apartment block where Linda used to live. Linda’s tiny heart had its last beat. We did not know where she was buried. We never had a closure. We never apologized.

We did not stay friends. We were not a closed-knit community, but I have beautiful childhood memories from that period of my life. I rarely visit the places, where we used to play, and I have probably forgotten many things. It seemed, I forgot Linda and our evil ways with her.

Years later, I was in the target of the bullies. I thought, I did not do anything wrong and I was tortured for no reason at all. Not long before remembering Linda, I thought my circumstances caused my exclusion. My classmates excluded me because I had curly hair, later they did the same thing, because I was interested in schoolwork. It was comfortable to say that I am the innocent victim.

But today, when I looked into my daughter’s beautiful light blue eyes and my gaze run through her dirty blonde hair and I caressed her beautiful face, it hit me, if she is anxious, she bites her fist too! And I remembered Linda.

I saw myself in the backyard again as the little girl in elementary school, playing cooking or playing with Barbies with my friends. And Linda appears. And no matter what would I do today in that position, how much I want to shake my younger self or explain to the bullies the importance of accepting other people, I cannot change that at that time I did nothing.

I cannot remember if I felt bad when we bullied Linda. Maybe the herd mentality urged me to not feel bad about it, or maybe I was not aware of the severity of my actions.

Until today, I thought I know what exclusion, loneliness, excommunication, and humiliation mean.

But today when this memory hit me so painfully, I had to realize that I do not know the first thing about 

what Linda had to endure in our group. I do not know what she went through, even if I was the target of the bullies for more than 4 years. None of us know what it was like for Linda.

Because all of us were healthy and we were normal in the eyes of society. Because nobody made us pull our panties down for a bar of chocolate and nobody laughed at us because we cannot withhold our stool.

Today, when I pray every day for the health and happiness of my daughter and the constant acceptance and love around her, I see Linda’s frail figure clearer than ever before. I see her as clear as I could not see her in the past. I see a little girl who is beautiful despite the messy hair, the dirty clothes and the disability and I see the unimaginable pain which we caused her. I, we cannot apologize for that now. This is something I cannot make right and I cannot reconcile with her.

Today, when I pray for my daughter, I ask for forgiveness. And I hope that Linda, who was pure and innocent among us, will not ignore my apology, will not make fun of me for my tears, no matter where she is now. Today, I pray that we were the last ones in the world who did something unspeakable like this.

Translated by Dorottya Bojtor

Quality check by Éva Loboda