!Love --- agk's diary 25 December 2024 @ 05:04 UTC --- written on Pinebook Pro in the living room after stuffing the stockings --- Thank you for the email Delyan. Thank you everyone who emailed this year: Sotiris, Robert, Solderpunk, Sebastian, Ian, Mike, Ben, Candide. Thanks Cat for writing in your log about being a bored parent. Thanks Defanor for updates from Russia and Freet for trips to Oz's dams. It's good to write, read, and be a small society with y'all. --- Arabella, Brooklyn, Ella, Bianca, Ava, fictional seventeen year-olds, are like hundreds of real seventeen year-olds thinking tonight about if they'll decide to recommit when they age out of foster care in a few months. Each Christmas and birthday they spent with a different family, in a different school, in residential, trying to get a hold of their case worker, wishing they weren't no-contact with their siblings since they all got removed from parental custody, grounded from all devices, wishing someone loved them, not wishing anymore. Arabella was removed from her mother at eight, separated from her sisters. Almost ten years in the system. "I want to recommit for the college money, apartment money, car money," she said, "but they won't let me live in Louisville. Anywhere in Kentucky but Louisville. I want to live in Louisville. I think I'm done. I'm tired of the system telling me where to go." Why she want to live in Louisville so bad? "Everywhere else in this state is racist." She lived with families and in residentials from Ashland on the West Virginia border to Paducah almost on the Missouri border, as far apart as Turkiye and Jordan. Over a hundred homes and facilities in ten years. She knows the state way better than I do. I understood she was trafficked in Louisville. I asked. "The last place I was in," she said, "they took forever getting my meds. They took forever getting me in school. I want to finish high school, but I was sitting around coming off risperdal, abilify, zoloft, and trazodone, with nothing for anxiety, nothing to help me sleep, nothing to do, no structure, no direction, up in my head. "They didn't give a fuck. I couldn't even get the youth specialist to talk to me, get to know me. My mind went to cutting, suicide, stuff like that. So I went AWOL, went to Louisville. There's a guy I know there I've kept in touch with since I met him three years ago. He's the only person I've known that long. He let me stay on his couch. "When I was at the gas station or whatever and people were like, hey you sexy, I like your legs, or whatever, I knew I could get like $200, $300, and I don't have no job, nobody supporting me. I said I was eighteen. I got some money. "The guy I was staying with didn't ask me for any- thing, but if I'm making money of course I'm going to share him half. He's on drugs. Drugs cost money. He didn't traffic me. All he did was let me have some place to be." Could she go to the University of Kentucky with money from recommitting, meet people who aren't doing that, make it through even one semester, get less rough around the edges, associate with people who have no idea people grow up like she had to, not get tempted by quick money into losing her recommitment money, house, freedom, everything? "Why couldn't I go to University of Louisville instead? I only get money like that when I'm on the street. If they let me work, I'd get a job!" She's smart enough. But she'd be so alone, faced with so much her life didn't prepare her for. Professors, TAs, counseling services, public safety wouldn't understand why she interprets and solves practical problems the way she does. Without a mentor or parent, without unconditional love? God mixed himself with us, grew in our womb, was born among us. He grew up with us, loved us, listened, taught, prayed with us. He gave His flesh and blood to knit us together in love for each other. He loves us still. He's born tonight, born to Arabella, Brooklyn, Ella, Bianca, Ava, that we might not exploit, abandon, institutionalize them. God commands: Love God and each other. Commands and is born. Commands and keeps loving. Love isn't a feeling. It's what we're made--continually created each moment--to do. Arabella knows all that.