Immortal Childhood. Prologue: Bite

Prologue: Bite

“It was then that Hook bit him.

Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest.”

~Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

They say, humans, that they wish to be a child forever. They say this but they do not mean it. I read a book once, where a little girl wished to remain a child, and when the Eternal Child came to take her she went on an adventure. But in the end she returned, to her lovely civilized bedroom in her comfortable townhouse in London, and she grew up. They all do. They all say it, only because they are all allowed to escape it, in the end.

They don’t understand, what it means, these humans. Eternal childhood.

They look at me, whenever I allow them, and they see this thin little blonde boy. Thirteen, maybe twelve. They smile, at my wispy hair, at my eyelashes, which are thick. Only I can feel my teeth, my abominations, hidden behind my grin, pressing against the insides of my lips.

They smile at the child kindly, their fingertips itch to weave themselves through my hair. They have no trouble looking me in the eye. Their pulses quicken when they see me. They want to clothe me and feed me, to take me from the shadows and make me their pet.

 They repulse me.

They are the ones that say they want to be a child forever. That’s what they think.

I haven’t been one in many years, in centuries. My shell is misleading. The divine irony is, the moment that froze my body in childhood, my very making, was the first true injustice, the first unfairness of it all. The moment I woke, hunger pulsing through my body like nothing I had imagined, buried in the earth, alone amongst the thick night of the most terrible forest, was the very moment I left childhood behind forever.

And the moment in which, I was trapped in it for eternity.