Youth

One

It is a pleasure to be young.

And like most pleasures, we tend to take it for granted. We bask in the freedom, complain about the exams because we don't realise how much harder life will get, listen to terrible music loudly, laugh louder, fight and scream at one another, our parents, the man next door who ran over our bike. We blink and miss things, important things, and ignore sunsets and sunrises because time doesn't apply to us. We are constantly on edge, deluded into thinking we can live like that forever.

It was the summer of my sixteenth year when my delusion shattered. There was a heatwave that year, with as much sun as thunder, and a frailty in the air like the world was holding its breath. The holidays began early for us, with exams ending mid-June in a flurry of relief and splendid indifference, and the open arms of the rest of our lives beckoning us impulsively.

I had waited my entire life for that moment, counted down the days until I was free and I had no one to answer to. We should have cherished it whilst we had buckets of it to spare, and spent that summer living as viciously and passionately as we could afford to. Instead we were swallowed in things bigger than us, than all of us, and not even Lewy could save us from them. I suppose youth is wasted on the wrong people. It was certainly wasted on us.

We were each running from something that summer.

I don't know quite where to start, but I suppose the morning Atle Bell-Ruud appeared on my doorstep is as good a place as any.