It’s April. Jesus rises, Cadbury eggs hatch, and across the country, people pin poppies to their chests, scissors on hand in case any look too tall.
If I read this letter aloud to you, with my stretched vowels, a half-smile, and a confused “yeah, nah” chucked in for good measure, maybe I’d sound less cynical. I’ve come to realize that when my words are isolated from my voice, I no longer have misty mountains or Lord of the Rings PR magic to soften the blow.
Without all that (eco-friendly) packaging, what’s left is harder to swallow. And what’s left can be summarized in the headlines I read this morning: “Auckland Teen’s Heartbreak Over Pack Rape Sentences Says System is ‘Messed Up’”; “Auckland Young People ‘Out of Control’ as Ram Raids Ramp Up”; “Auckland Teen Missing For Nine Days.”
Ironically, for all the news coverage that the youth receive, they are ignored in all the ways that matter. Being young in most countries means you’ll be overlooked — but being young, at the bottom of the world, where distance dulls empathy and headlines fade fast? You become forgotten. Even worse, you forget yourself.
If you were to walk through Auckland, you’d notice this sense of forgotten identity in the cracks of the cityscape. It’s in the way Queen Street still clings to its colonial namesake while streets with Māori names on the same block are mispronounced. It’s in Commercial Bay’s glossy fusion eateries, towering over the Hobson Street Mission, where someone’s son is sleeping on cardboard. It’s in the Grey Lynn cafes with $8 oat milk flat whites and Whānau Ora posters on the bulletin board. It’s in the murals, the Sunday markets, the pāua shell ashtrays at Aunty’s, the doilies at Nan’s, the Matakana wine tours, the Southmall security tags, the Skytower bungee jump, the Grafton Bridge jump rails, the siren jams, the seagulls, the te reo on the bus stop (never in the boardroom).
If you’re wondering, yes, it’s also in me.
It’s in most people, young and old. For Pākehā, the 1800s thrill of leaving the motherland to live on the “edge of the world” has long worn off, replaced by house prices, traffic, and a vague unease about whether they ever really belonged here. For Māori, it was never exciting
in the first place. It was loss, then silence, then the long, exhausting work of remembering. For those who are neither, the excitement was well-marketed: clean and green, 100 percent pure, a new life in paradise. Until paradise revealed its layers (and its landlords).
So, is it really a surprise that children born into absence, of anchoring, of connection, of something that feels like solid ground, are hurting and being hurt? New Zealand has the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world, but don’t expect to see that in any headlines.
I attended a “proper” high school in Central Auckland. The kind where parents move into leaky flats to get in-zone, the kind that promises opportunities and a safe decile rating.
Whenever a girl killed herself, the school made an announcement, monotone, the same way they read out a reminder about wearing the proper uniform. They’d say her name, followed by a pause. Then a vague offer: “Support is available if you need it.” They never said how. Or where. Or what had happened, though everyone already knew.
The counsellor would sit in his usual spot, door open, eyes on the clock.
Someone would say she had good handwriting.
Someone else would say she was too quiet to notice.
No one would say her name after a week.
And so the cycle would repeat.
I’m a young adult, and it still repeats in its own way. Except the hushing, the glazing over, the social backlash for complaining, the “she’ll be right” attitude is now instinctual. We don’t need a principal to push the issue aside anymore. We’re grown-ups. We can do it all by ourselves.
If this sounds like hate, it isn’t. It’s grief and love, in equal measure.
It’s hard to hate something this complicated, this familiar, this personal. Something full of contradictions and late-night conversations. Something that raised me. Something that still, somehow, feels like possibility.
But I do hate that the youth are ignored. Ignored in schools, where lunches come cold and late. Ignored in the justice system, where the culmination of their existence becomes a
sentence (and not just the legal kind). Ignored on the sidewalk outside WINZ offices, where they’re told to come back with ID they don’t have.
And I hate that when a kid goes missing, or steals a car, or gets hurt, that’s when they finally make the news. I hate that the only time they aren’t invisible in this city is when something bad happens to them, or something bad happens because of them. And even then, no one ever asks why.
It’s evening now. I’ve ordered pork dumplings from a store halfway down Dominion Road. The rain’s been torrential, non-stop, pooling in the cracks of the pavement. Outside, a boy runs for the bus with his hoodie half-zipped, shoes soaked through, laughing like he’s free. Maybe he is. Later tonight, a group of teenagers will park up on a hill somewhere in a borrowed car with AUX that only works if you hold it right. They’ll pass a joint, swap stories, and talk big. They’ll dream about moving to Sydney, to London, to somewhere cheap with a beach. And maybe, just for a second, they’ll consider staying.
I eat my dumplings. I think about the woman at the servo who always upgrades my coffee without asking. I think about the teacher who told me to write more and apologize less. I think about the people in this city who care, the ones who don’t, and the ones who pretend not to but definitely do.
The rain doesn’t look like it’s giving up any time soon. Fortunately, neither do we.