Week in, week out, another teenager goes missing. Usually a boy. He’s walked out of his home or wherever he’s been staying, and suddenly it’s news. The police put out an appeal: name, ID details, physical description—anything to help track him down as quickly as possible.
There’s always a photo. Height, build, hair colour and length, what he was wearing when he disappeared.
The bulletin always describes what the missing person looks like on the outside. Never what’s happening inside. The police tell us he’s gone, but they don’t explain why he left—because their job is to find him and bring him home, not to sketch out his… psychological profile.
And of course, what he looks like tells us nothing about why he ran. Blond or dark-haired, short or tall, thin or stocky—he leaves anyway. Nobody’s kidnapped him for ransom. He’s gone of his own accord. Gone where? To do what? We’re not told. Not publicly, at any rate.
“Another teenager has left home,” read a recent story in the paper about a 15-year-old schoolboy. His mother told police “This is the umpteenth time.” That “he has a habit of hiding on apartment block rooftops when he leaves home.”
No word on what the father said. Perhaps because the father isn’t there. Perhaps because he’s not in the boy’s life. So the teenager ran—perhaps because he’s living through separation, his parents’ divorce, a rupture with his family environment or his school environment. Or both.
The urge to run away is the painful story of his adolescence. It means he wants to be somewhere else. Not at home, not at school. Not stuck in what he sees as his problems.
He takes to the streets, climbs up to rooftops, crashes at a mate’s house. Maybe from some rooftop, life looks—for now—a little less terrifying, a bit more manageable, more bearable, more… promising.
But the teenager doesn’t stay on the rooftop. At some point he comes down, or he leaves his friend’s place where he’s been hiding and goes back to his own. He almost always comes back. And of course, his return isn’t news—not like his leaving was. His return, which is the crucial part of the whole story, never makes it into the papers.
