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Chapter 15

  From Within

Part 2: Secret

Time and time again the little girl had sensed a misty, undistinguishable fear in the air, like an unheard sound echoing portentously back and forth between her and a far away distant it was. She was convinced she was the one causing it, but she couldn't figure out just how: "It is as if I can make unpleasant things come about without even knowing what I'm doing ..." she'd thought to herself. Yes, she'd thought about this, a lot. When she'd put this eerie sensation together with the stories she'd been told, stories about her, who she really was, she felt like a clue had been offered her. You see, right after she was born the trolls had come and they took the real her and left one of their unpleasant troll-kids in her place. This meant, of course, she was a troll child. Yes, that's what the stories told, and that brought some sense into it all, as she saw it. Because the little girl knew from the fairytails that trolls were nasty, evil creatures, and so she was nasty and evil, at the very core of her being.
          Now, there wasn't anything much she could do about that, it was simply a natural part of her troll nature. The evil was there, it bided inside of her. So when she didn't do what she was told to, or if she did bad things in general, and if her mother then said that no child of hers could behave in such a way, her troll nature became more and more evident. It forced her to behave badly, yes that's how it had to be, because she didn't want to behave badly. On the contrary, she wanted her mother to see that she could be a really good, pretty, and amazing little girl, that she wasn't scary in the least! She wanted that more than anything.
          So she tried, really really hard, to prove her good heart, but at the same time, in having to prove it, she knew she was just trying – and that was almost the same as just pretending. When she did bad things, however, or things no one noticed, she didn't have to try. Such behaviours sprang forth anyway, like, she just did it, and often she didn't even know what she'd done before it was already out in the open. And it seemed to her that no matter how hard she tried she couldn't take control over her evil troll nature because she kept doing bad things every now and again. She'd thought about that, also, a lot, and she'd decided she must try even harder. Somehow she just had to find a way to take charge over her evilness.
          It became like a battle within her – to fight back the evil and to bring forth the good. She also had to figure out what really was meant by "good" and "bad". This wasn't easy. No it sure wasn't, because sometimes, the very same behaviour that had been rewarded before other times got punished. But there had to be some kind of difference, she'd thought, maybe in how she did it? Or maybe it was the words she used? Or was it the feeling she had when doing or saying it? She just didn't know. Twisting and turning different behaviours of hers, and different responses to her doings, she'd made huge efforts trying to sort things out; trying to find that pattern she wanted as a guiding compass to help her separate right from wrong. But she just couldn't find it.
          Well, some things she knew undoubtedly was very bad, "and to be honest", she said, "I would also like to figure out how to not like doing bad things." Yes, she wanted to be perfectly honest with me, and so she told me that, admittedly, sometimes, she really liked doing things others told her not to do.
         "It's important for you to know I'm the kind of person people feel uneasy being around", she continued. It was like a back and forth movement, she explained; people let her in, briefly, and the next moment, for reasons unknown to her, they pushed her away again. From this she'd learned that: "I can get repulsive real fast. Not so strange, perhaps, since I am, after all, a troll child". This innermost nature of hers made it next to impossible to like her, she'd reckoned. Hence she knew her parents were just playing with her, trying to make fun of her, when they showed her some kind of affectionate attention. She couldn't handle that.
          "I have to face reality", she said, "and take action from it". If she hadn't known it before this became crystal clear that horrendous night – dreadful to the extent of unspeakable – when everything was taken from her.

continues in Chapter Sixteen...