1999
My knee was scraped raw against the concrete. The pavement flew past so fast I turned the blood into spotted abstract art. Marcel, run faster, man, before those assholes catch us,
someone yelled. I could see Eniz and Ali ahead of me in the dark. We jumped fences, climbed hedges, ran down streets I didn’t even know existed. I had no idea if they were still chasing us or if we’d lost them somewhere in the last fifteen minutes of chaos, but my lungs were burning and I limped the last stretch to the playground gate. We climbed into the little house on the slide and collapsed into each other. I could hear their hearts pounding as loud as mine. Fireflies drifted around us in that eerie moonlight. We crouched there in total silence for minutes, just staring at each other, not moving, until dark shapes came running through the gate screaming our names and laughing, throwing their arms around us. It was them. The ZSC. My best friends.
It was the hottest night of that summer, and the millennium was about to change everything. Almost ten years ago now. I’m lying in bed and just before sleep drags me under, I think about that time with this ache in my chest. The intensity of it. How completely it shaped me. I close my eyes and I’m back on the couch with the crew playing video games, or I’m in a tent by a fire with Eniz and me kissing Anja, or we’re jumping off a cliff into the gravel pit, breaking into camper vans, fucked up behind a building with Kerstin and Mela, and it’s all happening at once, no time between any of it. Years when we felt invincible, when we swore it would always be like this, that we’d never let the world make us smaller, that everything we did meant something eternal.
Those summers were the most alive I’ve ever felt. You don’t get that back. Some days I can barely remember what it felt like, and other days it’s so sharp I can taste it.
When I’m deep in my own head and the old songs come on, I imagine waking up on our meadow. All my people standing over me asking if I’m okay, if I got hit in the head or something. And suddenly the whole ten years since that moment never happened—it was all just playing out in my head while I was lying there. But there’s no time to process it because I’m already chasing Sabse and Onur, everyone laughing, I’m grabbing a cheap drink from the discount store and we’re heading to the lake. And as I’m jumping into the cold water with all of them at the same moment, I’m thinking about Becca, about Berlin, about everything that came after. And I’m grateful—genuinely grateful—that this is just a dream.