Free Somewhere Over the Sea by Halfdan Freihow

demonstrate beyond any doubt that you’re your parents’ true-born son and that you, like them, would be wise to choose a career other than music.
    But this wasn’t about music. This was about longing and your need to be seen the way you saw that others were seen. It was about being included by the others, something you hardly ever experience ordinarily, at least not outside school hours. That treat is so exceptional for you that on the rare occasions when children your own age call on you at home you’re completely perplexed. You lose your conceptions, as you put it, without being quite sure what that means. Do you remember that day last summer when Marit from your class suddenly rang the doorbell? First she gave you a hug that left you embarrassed and almost lost for words, and then she asked if you wanted to go out and play. You were so busy expressing your amazement that you almost forgot to answer her:
    â€” Can you imagine, Dad? Someone in my class wants to visit me! And in the middle of summer holidays too!
    Yes, of course you wanted to be part of it, of course you wanted to sing, and of course you wanted to do it on a stage in front of the class and all the others. Of course you wanted to show them that you too could do it, that you were one of them.
    YOU ASK MANY and difficult questions, Gabriel, but some of them are difficult in complicated ways. If others had asked them, I might have perhaps considered them rhetorical and a bit stupid. When you’re the one asking, however, I see and hear that they are deeply serious questions, born of a pain in you that won’t go away, no matter how often you ask them, for they have no answers. They are questions like:
    â€” Why can’t I be like the others?
    â€” Because, son, because . . . you’re different.
    It isn’t a good answer and I know that. All the others are different too, and yet you’re unlike them. And it hurts you — more because you don’t understand why you’re different than because you actually are. The latter you can, in a sense, come to terms with. The former is a riddle with no answer, and you’re condemned to live with it.
    But even if you’re different, you’re not alone, Gabriel. Spread around the world are millions of people who struggle with the same sorts of problems as you do, even though they do so in other ways and with different preconditions. What unites you is that you don’t understand, you don’t master the social games that go on around you and seem so utterly easy and natural to the rest of us.
    Still you’re right, in a way, when you protest almost accusingly against such attempts to calm you and comfort you, when you express doubt that anyone else in the whole world can have the same problems as you, because no two people are exactly similar, so no two people can have exactly similar problems. You say this with a certainty I don’t quite know how to interpret. Is it simply a logical inference you’re formulating? Are you talking about a painful and perhaps unconscious insight that stems from your experience of being different? Or is it that you find strength and security in the experience of being the only one? Sometimes it seems as though you derive comfort from this very undefinability, as when you came home one day shortly after the start of a new school year and exclaimed happily, as though it were a great encouragement:
    â€” Hey, Mom, it’s so great — we’ve got a girl in our class who’s different! Yeah, not different like me, but different from the others!
    Your classmates are exceptional. From the very first day at school they’ve embraced you with a natural compassion that is free of any strained sympathy or adult-induced sense of obligation. They can tease you and shout at you, they can quarrel with you and have mock fights with you, they can also have real fights with you if they or you make