When your parents’ absence is not their fault, who then do you blame for your pain? What do you do with your anger when you can only blame something that feels abstract, like poverty? Always just voices, always just faces on a screen. No touch, no scent. No embraces. The parents are bodiless beings inhabiting mobiles and laptops. When enough time has passed, they become like digital ghosts, their voices distorted, their faces pixeled like puzzles. The first people that you relate to become, in time, a bit abstract.
I wanted to convey this longing for human touch, for the hands and the skin of someone’s parents. They are not totally absent, but also never quite there, available on a tight schedule, almost never at night. Night, when devices are off and the real absence begins. What cure or surrogate can one find for that? How do you satisfy this urge for human touch at the age of sexual discovery? The terrible frustration of this absence makes everything almost unbearable.
For many of these teenagers, family stops being the centre of their world and is instead replaced by the community around them: friends, neighbours, distant relatives – something that is not like a family, but something different, more inclusive, more free and more open. Anyone who is there for you when you need it. But still, how do you resist the emotional programming to desire a family?
Tudor Cristian Jurgiu
