Neverland
Ch 1
Neverland
Neverland.
Your ultimate dreams. Your wildest fantasies. Those thoughts that can never be spoken out loud except to the picturesque mermaids that decorate the lagoon's bank. Never written down, for that adult-like fear that it would be discovered.
Neverland.
The one place where you could take your escape from the too hard, the too exhausting, and the too real reality that you're living in and haunts you every day, until, your only means of escape, can only consist and prove to be your banishment from normal life on Earth.
A Neverland is never limited to one part of your imagination, and each one is different to the beholder. Neverland has no faults, no differences, no problems, and no cracks that you can slip through if you lost your way… just pure bliss. Just your happy memories. Just…paradise.
Some people might think of it as heaven, you know, the place you go when your soul leaves Earth and becomes immortal. Your finally means of escape.
Maybe that's what Neverland really is. A haven. A place where we start over. Where, instead of dying, we truly live. A place full of warmth and security. Perhaps security from the world we once knew. Yes. You know the world I'm talking about. If not, I'll explain.
That world full of problems and obstacles, which, when you look at it from Neverland's point of view, wasn't really that important. Wasn't really that critical. For instance, those unfinished bills, that ceiling piled to the brim with papers you forgot to sign, those impressions you tried to make on people, when in fact, those people really didn't matter.
A place where crying is unheard of, fictional. Tears in Neverland, if there ever are any, are called love drops. Love drops are those tears in the stream in ones' eyes that are held for the most pleasant occasions. Occasions full of jollity…laughter…happiness. These drops are only produced by the most gay, but everyone has them. The only reason that some do not perform them is because they have forgotten how.
Because they have grown up.
People say that you grow up because you don't want to be a child anymore. And I suppose that's true. Some people don't want to be children anymore. Some people find that childhood is just a waste, a loss of time when you could have been doing more serious things, like going to work, or perhaps even studying for that major test you are so worried about. And they're entitled to that opinion, that frame of mind. But, adults pay the ultimate sacrifice when they choose this fateful option. In the span of up to thirty seconds, which humanly is not considered a lifetime, a lifetime is forgotten. Boys become men and girls become women, and they lose their former self completely. They lose the things that are valued the most in children. Their gaiety…their heartlessness…and the one thing that separates them from adults… their innocence. When people die, there last few moments, save for their thoughts of their special haven, they usual reflect on what it was that went wrong in their life. Where they went wrong. That is not so in children.
Children are, if anything, more complex to understand than adults, and despite adults greedy intentions, children are not so easily won. Children know what happens. They feel it before they see, much like canines. They can read through the contours of your voice, and they can make your expressions seem transparent. Secrets are the only elements of pretending that children do not believe in. And that is why secrets die so fast; no child is there to believe them.
The most complex thing about a child is their mind. Every day a child grows older, grows wiser, and with that comes the elements of adulthood, of knowing. Have you ever tried to read a child's mind? No, I suppose you haven't. You can't. It is impossible! A children's mind is not like a map that you can open and close at will and refer to as your paramount reference, and know it will never contain or reveal new information. Doctors can create maps of other parts of your body, like your circulatory system for example. They create a map for those just in cases, for if anything is ever wrong or out of place. That is unheard of in a child's mind. Imagine them trying to conjure a map of a child' mind. I'd like to see them try. For a child's mind is not only confused, but keeps going and working and seeing all the time. It's always registering something, no matter what it is. Nothing is out of place there. Everything is taken in, never sorted out. In their mind they have all the adventures of that day, the things they heard, the places they'd seen, and even though they stow them away in the back of their mind, they never forget. Until they become adults of course.
When they become an adult, they are able to now sort out those memories and things that they don't want or don't find necessary anymore. They pack them up in boxes and just like a woman who is divorced and does not wish for the husband to contain his things in her presence anymore, they throw it out through the window in the part of their brain that contains their mentality. Most of the time, those boxes, contains their imaginations. The one thing that adults keep, for reasons that I am unsure of, is the ability to pretend.
Now, even if you can't see it, there is a difference from imaging to pretending. To imagine is to see yourself as you wish you could be. You have no other frame of mind, no other thought besides your wanting, your need, and your happiness. Imagining is forgetting the consequences, the problems and just remembering that there is a way to escape. Pretending is like the qualifications of murder, although not that drastic and illegal. To pretend means that you know full well that there is a world beyond which you pretend. There are consequences; there are rules. To pretend, you make an artificial escape, believing that as long as no one knows, you can keep pretending. But, when someone discovers the truth, you can't pretend anymore. And that is why children grow up so fast when they find that adults pretend to them. In reality, all mothers suffer a death of a child. They lose them when they grow up. They lose them when they start pretending.
Neverland
The place where adults find their imaginations again. A place where adults don't need a status to be accepted. No one is rejected.
Neverland
A place where you never get older and never get tired from those things that you thought unimportant. The place where adults stop growing up and truly start living. Adults see the truth in things, not the price. They see the things they rejected to see because they were too busy, too tired, or too old. Or even, too scared.
Neverland is the place where they realize they never get older and never get tired from those things that they thought unimportant, these being mainly their childhood. They embrace it with open arms and they realize that their forgotten childhood imagination, wasn't really a barrier to secrets of happiness in life. That their life might have been better if they had just believed in their imaginations and didn't throw it out their glass frames.
My name is really of no consequence to those living in real life, but to them I am known as James Matthew Barrie. I know what your thinking. Since I know so much about Neverland, you think I invented it; that I made it up. But that is not so. The first baby, known as Cain, was the first child to open its eyes and embrace his imagination and create his ultimate escape, his Neverland. The first Neverland.
Neverland was created by God, and is his final gift. Heaven. But Cain, being human and mortal and containing God's gift of free will, he was also known as the first boy to become a man, and to throw his imagination away… to stop believing.
You don't know me, so you don't have to believe me, but Neverland is real. It exists, whether you accept it or not. I did not invent it; I just named it. And in Neverland, I have my own name. A different one. One that is not judged or classified in status. One that reflects my imagination, which I have never lost even though I am thirty-three years of age. I have never grown up, although because of how I appear, that is what adults believe. I say adults because they have suffered the loss of their imagination. But children, who still have their precious imaginations, and know the truth of Neverland, disregard my born name, and bless me with this one…
Peter Pan.