A Child’s Surrender
A Real Story
The older I get, the more I think about our world and the strange, invisible forces that keep living creatures together. Lions travel in prides. Wolves stay in packs. Wildebeest move across endless plains in herds so large they look like rivers flowing through Africa. Sometimes I wonder if people are really any different.
Maybe it all comes down to the part of us that is subject to the instinct of the flesh: survival.
I remember thinking about this years ago after hearing about a boy named Bruno.
I was sixteen when I met him. It was around 1980, back when kids who looked or acted differently stood out like sparks in dry grass. Bruno was mixed race — Asian and Black — and unlike anyone else at our school. He wore a black leather jacket even in warm weather, had pierced ears before that was common, and carried himself with a kind of quiet confidence that made people stare. He reminded me of a young rock star, someone who belonged on a stage instead of wandering the dull hallways of a public high school.
Most kids thought he was strange.
I thought he was interesting.
We talked a few times at school, never deeply, but enough that one afternoon I suggested he come hang out in my neighborhood after classes. Looking back, I think he was excited by the invitation. It probably meant more to him than it did to me.
Getting to my side of town wasn’t easy. Bruno took a train and then two buses just to spend a few hours wandering around with me.
At first, I thought the day would be fun. But something never clicked between us. Conversation stumbled and died. We walked around a local flea market mostly in silence, pretending to people-watch while both of us quietly realized we didn’t know what to say to each other.
Even now, decades later, I can still picture him sitting beneath the overhang of a fish stand near the front entrance of the market. The late afternoon sun barely touched his face. He looked calm — too calm for a teenager. Not sad exactly. More like someone who had already accepted something unavoidable.
At the time, I didn’t understand that look.
I only remember feeling uncomfortable.
People stared at him everywhere we walked. My neighborhood had almost no mixed-race families then, and Bruno attracted attention the second he appeared. I noticed the glances. I noticed the whispers. And shamefully, instead of standing beside him, I wanted distance from him.
By the end of the evening, the market vendors began shutting down for the night. Bruno and I exchanged a few awkward words, and then he disappeared into the crowd without even saying goodbye.
I remember feeling relieved after he left.
A month later, my older brother told me Bruno was dead.
He had killed himself in his basement with cyanide.
The news hit me like cold water, but not in the noble, compassionate way I wish it had. My first thought wasn’t grief. It was fear. I hoped nobody at school knew I had spent time with him. I didn’t want to be associated with the strange mixed-race kid who committed suicide.
That memory still shames me.
Back then, I didn’t understand what rejection could do to a person. Teenagers are consumed with survival inside their own social ecosystem. We cling desperately to our groups, our tribes, our sense of belonging. Anyone outside the clan feels dangerous — not always physically, but socially.
It isn’t so different from the instincts that govern our world.
As humans, we like to pretend we’ve evolved beyond those instincts, but I don’t think we have. We still search constantly for affiliation. We still crave the comfort of people who look like us, think like us, talk like us. And when we don’t find that connection, something inside us begins to fracture.
Years later, I began noticing how often fear disguises itself as judgment.
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I saw it once on a photography trip through rural Colorado. I had stopped near a farm after spotting one of the most beautiful horses I’d ever seen — a black-and-white mustang standing alone in a corral behind a farmhouse.
I walked up to the open gate with my camera hanging harmlessly from my shoulder. I honestly expected a friendly conversation. After all, I looked like them: white, clean-cut, polite. I assumed that alone granted me acceptance.
I rang the bell.
A middle-aged woman opened the screen door and barked, “Can I help you?”
The hostility in her voice stunned me.
I politely asked if I could photograph the horse.
“No.”
At first, I thought I’d misheard her over the wind. I started repeating my question when suddenly she exploded.
“NO! Didn’t you see the sign?”
Only then did I notice her husband standing near the barn about twenty feet away, staring at me like a coiled snake ready to strike. I realized instantly that if I said one wrong word, things could turn ugly fast.
As I walked away, I understood something important.
Their fear had nothing to do with race.
It was tribal.
To them, I was an outsider approaching their territory. I wasn’t part of their clan. I didn’t belong there, and therefore I represented potential danger.
That realization stayed with me for years.
So did Bruno.
As I grew older and watched school shootings, rising suicides, and the strange isolation created by social media, I started thinking about him more often. Kids today spend hours hiding behind screens, communicating through text instead of learning how to exist face-to-face. Rejection has become quieter, more invisible, but no less deadly.
Human beings are not built for isolation.
We need belonging the same way living creatures throughout our world depend on the herd, the pack, or the pride.
I think Bruno understood that long before I did.
Toward the end of his life, maybe he had already convinced himself he didn’t belong anywhere. Not with white kids. Not with Black kids. Not at school. Not at home. Maybe he believed he existed outside every tribe entirely.
And if a person truly believes they belong nowhere, what happens then?
We are of divine creation, but we live in bodies of flesh, with one foot in a divine existence of consciousness and another in animal consequence. Perhaps that is the eternal struggle of being human — to rise above our instincts while never fully escaping them.
I still think about the expression on his face under that fish stand all those years ago. Back then, I mistook it for peace. Now I understand it was surrender.
