The Fire That Asked to Be Seen

There was this boy who used to sit alone on a rusted porch a few blocks from my childhood home. I don’t remember his name—just the stillness of him. Like he was holding his breath for a world that would never exhale. Some kids wear silence like a hoodie; he wore it like skin. People said his parents were “complicated,” which is adult code for we’d rather not get involved.

He vanished sometime before junior year. No one asked where.

It’s strange how easily a person can be erased just by not being wanted. Not hated, not bullied. Just… unchosen. And when someone goes unseen long enough, they begin to wonder if they were ever real.

Lately, I think about him when I scroll past the headlines—another teenager radicalized online, another manifesto, another explosion of grief dressed as rage. People gasp, ask the same tired questions: How could this happen? Why didn’t anyone see the signs?

But invisibility doesn’t leave signs. It leaves absence.

We like to believe harm begins with intent. But it often begins with neglect. With a society so obsessed with productivity that it forgets to love. With institutions that throw diagnoses at kids who just needed to be held. With parents performing parenthood online while their children feed algorithms instead of being fed affection.

The child who is never loved by the village doesn’t just burn it down for revenge. He does it for recognition. Look at me, the flames scream. I exist.

We scroll on.

People assume destruction is about hate. But sometimes it’s just the only way left to feel anything. If you grow up cold, even fire feels like love. Especially fire.

There’s a terrifying simplicity to it: the unloved seek warmth wherever they can find it—even if it costs them the world.

Loneliness isn’t quiet. It just gets good at hiding.
Apathy is cruelty dressed in politeness.
And a child who learns he doesn't matter will teach the world what that means.

We talk about digital radicalization like it’s a sudden disease. But most of these kids weren’t poisoned—they were starved. Starved of community, of stability, of someone who said you belong here.

They turn to forums, to ideologies, to avatars that offer identity in exchange for obedience. They become footnotes in tragedies we pretend are anomalies. But they’re symptoms. We’ve just grown desensitized to the sickness.

The village keeps asking Why are our children angry?
Maybe the better question is Why did we expect them not to be?

We love the idea of community, until it demands responsibility. We want safe neighborhoods, but not the mess of knowing our neighbors. We want schools to raise them, screens to distract them, therapists to fix them—anything but us.

But a child doesn’t need to be rescued by the world. They need to be received by it. Fully. Messily. Now.

I keep thinking someone should’ve said hi to that boy on the porch. Not out of pity, but presence. Not to save him, but to see him.

Sometimes I wonder if he burned quietly instead—just another child swallowed by a village too busy preserving its image to protect its people.

Maybe the ones we forget to love don’t destroy the village.
Maybe they become the ghosts that haunt it.