I do not remember if I chose this life, or was forced into it.
I remember running through a wheat field as a child, while my mother hoed the earth and my brother tried to catch field mice for dinner.

I breathed the air that smelled of flowers, drank the still unpolluted water of the streams, lived a poor, futureless peace, but peace nonetheless.
By day.
I remember that in the evenings my father often did not come home, and that was better.
When he came back drunk on that fetid schnapps they make by the big pond, he would lay his hands on everyone, except my brother.
Then it was my brother who put his hands on me.
I didn't finish school and I wasn't the first in the village to run away from home.
When you are fifteen no one looks for you anymore.
The policemen as long as you are young and pretty know what to ask you to leave you alone.
And you want to tell them 'but what peace, there is no peace in the city, there is freedom at best'.

Yeah, freedom.
They say it's that thing where you can do whatever you want, right?
So I have known this filthy freedom.
I was free to be abused by whoever I wanted and for money, free to sleep by the side of the road under a jute blanket, free to wear rags, free to spit on the ground, free to eat anything picked out of the rubbish that didn't smell like shit.
I am still free to live and to die, without having to ask permission or apology or anyone.
But I realised that peace, even the most miserable and derelict of peace, is the most important thing everyone should live and fight for.

(photo by Leni Frau)