In Search of Neverland

Prologue

There came a time, when you were sitting on the bench in the park, looking at your young children having fun with their stuffed animals on the grassland, feeling a slight envy toward the life and the time they have ahead of them on which you don’t as much as how fast they’re going to lose them, and found them to be resembling your old self in an strangely alike way, as if the old days you once knew so well was replaying, only you were no longer watching it in the same theatre in the same old seat. The memories was coming back all at once, as if sometimes the shadow of your first love was coming back to you from an old memory buried deep down in your brain in a rainy sentimental night. You laughed, you felt embarrassed, you shook your head lightly and thought of how silly you once were.

That was exactly what Gwen didn’t want. However, she felt like everyone around her, her friends, the older girls in her school, were all falling into the trap, one by one. The trap of growing up. Was it inevitable that everyone would grow up, get married, have children, and forget about the way they used to be? Were there fairies? Did Neverland exist?

The first memory of Gwen when she was small was watching Peter Pan with her mother. The ending wasn’t sad at all, but she cried anyway. She felt a slight disappointment in Wendy, somehow hatred, when Wendy decided to leave Neverland. Gwen saw this as an act of betrayal. Somehow, it was the reason why Gwen always had a soft spot for Tinker Bell or basically any fairies. Her parents named her Gwendolyn after Wendy, which she insisted on others calling her “Gwen” instead of “Wendy” since she disliked Wendy ever since she could remember.

Her parents always read Peter Pan to her when she had a nightmare at the middle of the night. When she woke up sweating and screaming in her room. Her parents pushed open the door and ran to her side, sitting beside her on her bed. At last, her father or her mother would always stay and read her Peter Pan. It was mostly her father, who was a great storyteller. He would sit beside her bed and pat her head lightly. He told her about the Neverland, the Lost Boys, the fairies, the mermaids, which Gwen was so familiar with but she would never get tired of listening to them. When her father finished, Gwen would tug his shirt and beg him not to go. Then he would stay with her until she fell asleep.

It was the old days though. They never did that now.