The Ominous Message from the Night Owl

I met her abroad many years ago. We were both young, around 20. We came from two different countries and had signed up for a language course in a city in southern Europe.

It was the first day of the language course. We stood outside the auditorium waiting for them to let us in. We were a group from many different countries in and outside Europe who were to come in and get the first introduction to the language course. I stood a little away from the front doors of the auditorium, waiting for those closest to the entrance to start entering.

I felt that someone was looking at me. I quickly tried to scan the faces around me, but when I looked I saw no one looking at me. I turned my face back and looked towards the front doors, and then I suddenly caught sight of her. She stood looking at me, and when I saw her she first looked away from me. But then she was back and met my gaze. That was when it happened. I felt I had to get her.

What happened there was the start of a cohabitation that would have unforeseeable consequences for the two of us, as well as for people close to us. My wife - who later became my ex-wife - and I were in love from the first moment. We - two complete strangers in voluntary 'exile' abroad - we met, we found each other and we went into a bubble together, she and I. We played love and manipulated each other to believe that this love, what we had together now - it was the Big thing, the biggest and best thing in life.

We did not go into that auditorium. Instead, we walked out of the building, over to the main gate and out. We walked hand in hand further down to the river where we stopped under some big trees. There were huge treetops with heavy branches hanging down that made us almost invisible to the eyes of the rest of the world.

We were two young people in the first phase of adult life. We ​​were set to share the future with each other. We stood under the heavy foliage, blindly and uncompromisingly in love, and held on to each other. There and then, suddenly, I heard the owl for the first time, the sound of the owl that I have had with me for more than the last fifty consecutive years as a painful memory - a warning of misfortune.

The owl sitting in the big tree was the warning of unhappy and sad things that were going to coma. She warned of what was going to happen in our lives, ruining lives with much suffering and evil that we had never asked for, and which we lacked the ability to prevent.

And why was it like that? Why did we not just get far away from each other there and then, after the first meeting, while there was still time? Why did we go into it instead? Why do we end up in an endless series of days of arguing, shouting, lying, manipulating, falsehood, irritation, anger, gaslighting and all the crazy stuff that belongs to a disturbed mind?

Why was it like that, and that we had a daughter who because of us made her life a wasted life in intoxication and addiction?

I don't know now, as little as then, more than fifty years ago, what led to the misery. After 15 years of living together in quarrels and meaningless conflicts, my ex-wife and I finally agreed to leave each other. I moved out, and we had an agreement that our daughter should live primarily in her mother's house. But we also agreed that she would be with her dad every other weekend and every Wednesday afternoon.

This arrangement did not last for long. After only a short time my ex-wife would no longer let our daughter meet her father. She got crazy thoughts and ideas that it was not "good" for our 12-year-old girl to meet her father - me.

The underlying reason was probably jealousy, because after I met a new lady who I later married, my ex-wife went completely in black and did everything she could to cut the bond between our daughter and me, her father.

And what happened next? Our daughter escaped as a 16-year-old from home (away from her mother and the conflicts there) and slept in the apartments of various unknown people in the city center. She started with substance abuse, and ended up abusing heavy drugs. As a 17-year-old, she came together with a 38-year-old man who provided her with drugs and made her pregnant. The child's father was himself a drug addict, but he deliberately kept himself away from the hard drugs he supplied my daughter with.

How was my daughter? Over the years, I have tried to keep in touch and support her. It has been very demanding, and to some extent periodically impossible. She has lived for 30 years as a hard drug addict with all the atrocities that come with it. A wasted life due to a couple of parents who failed, a mother who refused her daughter to have contact with her father because this mother was morbidly jealous of her ex-husband.

My ex-wife wanted to punish me because she did not really want us to divorce. Who paid the price for my ex-wife's revenge? Our 12-year-old daughter who has lived the next 37 years of her life in drugs and a meaningless rush for drugs.