Broken But Not Beyond Repair

A short story about a boy/man who became addicted to drugs

 

There once was a man who once was a boy lost in the wilderness. For thirty years he wandered from dark place to darker denser void. Dead to his family who could neither find nor reach him he stumbled through the bracken with no compass to help him find his way back home.

Often was the time that family called to him with no response. Regrets and sorrow their companions until the time came when they no longer cried out in despair, hope abandoned, with only a glimmer left from time to time. Prayers sent out for this lost and lonely boy, not knowing if they would be heard or answered.

Cruel though life was both the boy and the family survived each in their own way. Thoughts of the boy put aside only surfacing around birthdays and Christmas. All efforts to search for him gone, while day to day life called them to be present without looking back. Dreams’ sometimes reminding them of what was gone, and of what could have been. Hearts covered over with stitches to keep the wound from gaping open.

In the wilderness the boy growing to a man had all but forgotten who he was, living under an illusion that he was someone else and that he belonged in the wilderness, and yet something stirred within him every so often and made him want to reach out, but he had forgotten the language of the normal world and couldn’t make himself heard or understood and the family didn’t know how to speak the sounds of the wilderness, which to them was a wild and desolate place that they couldn’t and did not want to enter. It frightened them and they knew that people that lived in the wilderness knew only darkness.

And yet one day someone came across the boy who was now a man and helped him gradually come out of his dark universe and showed him that there was light, and with their help and a lot of time he once again re-entered the normal world and though it was hard to adjust, he began to realise that he had a family who had been longing for his return.

Step by step they became acquainted and tentatively they walked towards each other and although the boy who was a man was broken, he was still able to be repaired and with love and understanding his days of drug filled stupor were now behind him instead of in front and, though fragile he had the will and the strength to leave the wilderness behind.