Long-Distance Calls

Prologue

Dear Future, I want to tell you a story.

It's a story that you might consider miserable, naïve and overall unmemorable, but I'm going to tell anyway, because some of you might even find this story interesting, captivating and overall motivating.

It's a story that's not made up, that I don't want to be made up. It's about the raw real life; the crude reality of the world; it's about how things really work out out of books.
The story I want to tell you is about me, and my quest for the one.

August 2011

"You know, I have the strangest feeling that I've seen that ship before. A long time ago, when I was very young," said Mr. Darling by Wendy's window, staring at the clouds shaping into Peter Pan's ship in the sky with dreamy eyes, the same that were usually cold and disenchanted.

"Aren't you a little too old for Peter Pan?" asked my mother, as the film rolled its credits, and for a moment I thought she was talking to Mr. Darling.

"If this film taught me anything," I responded, "is to never grow up..."

"You know, the first time you saw this--"

"I know, mom." I cut her off. "I was three, in hospital for convulsions, and they put me near to a little two-year old girl who put the VHS in the little hospital TV. You say this every time."

"It's still incredible," she observed, "how one can obsess over a film all his life by first watching it when so little..."

"What did this girl look like anyway?" I wondered, "It's all just a blur to me."

"Oh, I barely remember myself... She had dark hair and eyes..." my mom explained.

"Wonder if she remembers me... but who does ever?"

"Oh, please... how could someone remember something from when they were three, anyway," she smirked and walked away.

I guess the thing that struck me the most about that ending was how such a practical man like Mr. Darling could allow himself to dream for once.

As my mother stood in the kitchen, I looked at her from the couch. I could see the wrinkles around her eyes, looking down, dull. It's like there was nothing more to see for her. Like her life was over. Her eyes were the epitome of disenchanted. I'd like to see her dream like Mr. Darling for once.

Me, I was a dreamer. A hopeless dreamer. Ever since I first saw Peter Pan I'd been wishing to find Neverland. Just imagine... a place where I wouldn't grow up and wouldn't have to deal with everyone else growing up in this messed up society.

"I feel like a child," I explained to Belle later that day, "I feel like puberty never hit me. I feel like I'm staying a kid while everyone else is getting old."

Belle crossed her thin, naked legs, covered only by short jeans, on the bench.  "You see, Peter..." I tried to look in her perfectly shaped blue eyes but I was blinded by her long, blonde hair reflecting the sun, and her garish green tank top did not help with that. That afternoon, the sun was shining all over Flushing Meadows Park, making the trees look greener than they actually were.

"That's a feeling you have. You feel like you're not growing up, but you are. You're about to start high school in a month, and you're even fifteen."