THE LOST BOYS

(for the children who grew older, but never stopped searching)

​

We were not born beneath second stars. No soft-handed Wendy leaned from nursery windows calling us home before dark.

We were born instead in waiting rooms, contact centres, temporary beds with fitted sheets that smelled of bleach, policy, and someone else’s leaving.

We learned young that “placement” meant geography, not peace. That home could be a postcode without belonging. That black bin bags could carry your whole childhood if folded small enough.

And so we became the almost children. The Inbetweeners. The Neverlanders without maps.

Not because we would not grow up. God, we grew.

We grew claws where trust should have lived. Sharp tongues, survival smiles, exit plans. We grew fluent in footsteps, moods, weather systems inside adults. We grew in fragments.

But some wild, barefoot part of us stayed there beneath fluorescent hallway lights, age seven, ten, fourteen, still wondering if this next house, this next bed, this next “we’re here to help” might finally mean: mine.

And even now, late grown, rent due, children and grandchildren of our own perhaps, or silence where family should be, something in us still startles when love arrives gently.

Still waits for conditions, expiry dates, for: “Sorry, this isn’t going to work out.”

Because when you are raised more by systems than safety, you learn survival before softness.

And some of us became experts at burning good things down. Not because we crave ruin, but because ruin always introduced itself first.

So we run before abandonment can catch us. Laugh too loud. Love too hard. Leave too soon. Or stay where pain is familiar, because chaos can feel more like childhood than peace ever could.

But listen.

We are not broken boys. Not broken girls. Not broken grown-ups dragging scraped wings through life.

We are the lost tribe of remarkable warriors. We built marrow from neglect. Muscle from abandonment.

We stitched brotherhood and sisterhood from eye contact across group homes, prison yards, street corners, school gates, rehab circles, night shifts.

We know each other.

Not by surname, because many of us wear borrowed ones, but by something older: the flinch, the humour, the hunger, the way we scan exits, the way we protect those we love like sacred things, the ache at Christmas.

We are connected by the invisible thread of children who learned to raise themselves in worlds that confused management for love.

And still, look at us.

Working. Creating. Fathering. Mothering. Breaking addictions. Building homes we were never shown.

Some became storms. Some became shelters. Most became both.

Because resilience in children like us is not a motivational quote. It is blood memory. It is teeth. It is poetry written in the language of: I survived.

We are Peter Pan if he ever came back. Not to crow from rooftops, but to stand in the wreckage of boyhood and finally grieve.

To gather the others — the addicts, the carers, the fighters, the fathers who never had one, the women still mothering their own inner child — and say:

I know.

I know what it is to search for home in people, places, chaos, and flight. I know what it is to grow older without ever fully arriving.

But look.

We are here.

Still breathing. Still brutal with hope. Still carrying the sacred rebellion of children who should have disappeared but didn’t.

So here’s to the Lost Boys. The lost girls. And those who left this earth when the fight became too much.

Here’s to the lost grown hearts still learning they were never lost.

Only unsheltered. Only unnamed. Only waiting to be found by each other.

— TazTrev@truthspit