Lost Boys

It’s a real place. If you take the second star to the right and travel straight on till morning, you will arrive in the place called Neverland. There lives a boy called Peter Pan and a man called Captain Hook. There live the Indians and the mermaids and the fairies. There live the lost boys.

They roam with Peter Pan, following a life they think they love. They live in a land where children never grow up, but it’s an illusion. Children do grow up. Their childhoods are prolonged beyond what they are in the real world, but it's part of the curse. The curse of Neverland pays them in full for the time they spend there. As long as they stay forever, Neverland will grant them the youth the desire--for a time. But they all become pirates in the end. They all become evil when they grow.

Peter happened upon Wendy Darling by accident. He left Neverland for a moment. Why he left his land of dreams remains a mystery--maybe he wandered too far, like a lost soul stumbling into a church he never meant to attend--but he came to the real world in the end. He left the land of illusions and lies and landed for a moment in the land of truth.

“Come back with me,” he said. “Come back and teach us your ways. Show us what it means to have a father and a mother. Show us what it means to have a family.”

So Wendy returned with him. They flew through the night on wings of fairy dust and arrived in a land of dreams. It was strange—being in a world of lies. Wendy came and acted as a mother. She showed the lost boys what it meant to have a mom, but she couldn’t feed them real food. There was no real food to be had. She could only tell the lost boys and Peter Pan about the delicious meals she could make. She could only tell them how nasty it was to take medicine to heal sicknesses the lost boys didn’t know they had. She could only tell them.

And she could invite them.

“Come back with me,” she said. “Come back. Taste and see how good the real world is, and you will know what you are missing. Come back and have a mother and a father. Come back and be adopted. My father will adopt you, and you can be true sons and heirs with my brothers. Come back.”