runaway

I saw Francisco's story a few weeks ago in the New York Times and after reading it I felt there was much left unsaid. The article covers a thirteen year old boy who spent 11 days riding the subway back and forth between the five boroughs. Not spoken to, questioned, or generally noticed. He floated among the waves of strangers in business suits or with shopping bags; men and women disengaged from what went on around them.
Francisco's Asperger's Syndrome and ethnicity weave in and out of explanations and accounts as to why a young boy could go missing for such an extended period in such a highly populated area. But the article seems to act like a veil to something more innate about human behavior. "Nobody really cares about the world and about people," he states in an interview.
It is almost as if Francisco were performing is own version of an Erving Goffman social experiment. He exploits a kind of truth in his odyssey. There is something left unsaid about human nature that causes us to be so in tune to a sports star's love affairs yet so negligent of our own world surrounding us.