1999
I’d scraped my knee running from the cops. The concrete flying under my feet got turned into a small red-dotted work of art somewhere along the way. "Marcel, come on, move it, before those idiots catch us!" I could make out Eniz’s and Ali’s faces ahead of me in the dark. We jumped fences, climbed hedges, ran the full length of the Zugspitzstraße. No idea whether anyone was still behind us after fifteen minutes of sprinting across the entire city, but I was completely out of breath, hobbling the last stretch to cover. We shoved the wooden gate open, climbed into the little hut at the top of the slide, and collapsed onto each other. I could hear their hearts hammering just as loud as mine. A few fireflies drifted around us and through the trees and the full moon bleached the whole space into something bright and strange. We sat there without moving, staring at each other for what felt like minutes, until a group of dark shapes came crashing through the gate straight toward us, shouting our names, laughing, throwing their arms around us. Them. The ZSC. My best friends.
It was the hottest summer night of the year and the millennium was coming. That was almost ten years ago. Lying in bed now, right before sleep drags me sideways into some chaotic parallel world full of violence, sex, and ponies, I think back on that time with something that doesn’t have a clean name. I close my eyes and I’m back on the couch with the guys playing Super Smash Bros., then in the tent by the campfire while Eniz and I both have our hands on Anja at the same time, then jumping off the cliff into the quarry lake, breaking into the caravan, curing whatever the Chrissy thing was, crying at the Fritz, groping behind the shed with Kerstin and Mela, getting our first real drunk. The years between then and now go blank, like they never happened.
I miss those summers because they were the most alive I’ve ever felt. Years when we were invincible, when we swore we’d stay this way, that we’d never bend to what society wanted from us, that everything we did was singular and would be remembered forever. And we had, without any question, the best Pokémon team in history.
When I’m deep enough in my own head and old songs are running through my headphones, I imagine waking up suddenly in the middle of our field. Everyone around me, the whole old crew. Someone says: "Marci, you alright? You took a football to the head." I look around confused until it lands—the entire decade since that moment never happened. All of it just a knock to the skull, a fever dream. There’s no time to sit with it because I’m already chasing Sabse and Onur across the grass and everyone’s laughing. I drink a warm cheap lemonade from the supermarket and later we’ll go to the lake. And as we all jump into the cold water at the same time, I think of Becca. Of the FOS. Of Berlin. And I’m glad—genuinely glad—that this one is just a dream.