There is a strange wonder to be found in the brief, dizzying sickness of being young. When you are riding shotgun in your best friends car and the windows are open and you are f*ing cold but the music is playing so loud that all you are thinking about is the bass pumping through the speakers and the seats and your heart, and the night is dark and the roads are empty and you could be absolutely anywhere in the world. When there is the awful taste of alcohol burning the childhood right out of your belly and you tilt your head back and breathe smoke like a dragon into the musty air of someone’s basement, when you curl up against each other and talk in sure voices about love and sex and the hierarchy of high school. When you tell yourself you were a messed-up, ugly kid but you know that in a few short years, you’ll look at your yearbooks and call yourself a messed-up, ugly teenager. You can’t win under the light of the sun, but the moon turns a blind eye, and suburbia in the nighttime is your big romantic playground. You can hate someone by the clothes they wear or love someone by the way they tell a joke. We destroy ourselves and we call it beautiful. We break easily because we have realized that there is so much out there that can be felt. We’re ill. We’re stark raving mad, you’re damn right. Some of us choose to announce our madness from the highest of towers with a megaphone in hand, and some of us are mad in our silence, burying ourselves deep in books and bedcovers and self-loathing. We know that there are starving kids in third-world countries, we know that there’s trees being cut down and global warming and all that wretched jazz, but for a blessed few years, our madness and the little world it permeates is all that matters to us. But the fire burns out eventually, as it must. It starts with the frost on the car windows on Sunday morning, with the steady IV drip of responsibilities and expectations. We run wild through the firework maze of the Inbetween, and stop dead at a great stone wall that says REAL LIFE, staring at it with scared eyes. You can’t go over the wall, or under it, or around it, you have to run headlong into it. And when you come out through the other side, with purple bruises and a bleeding lip and a “moral conscience”, they pronounce you “cured”. You’re an adult now, take off your adolescent hospital bracelets, put on a suit, and start building your life. You obey, of course, because being a homeless anachronism on the side of the street scares you. But sometimes, and only sometimes, you stop to reminisce. You try to be condescending, you try to look down on it from your new grown-up pedestal, but there’s always that flicker in your eyes that gives it all away. That flicker that says, I remember. I remember the fever and the chills and the delirium and the freedom that comes from the brief, dizzying sickness of being young.