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nineteen years old After having one of the busiest nights at work in weeks, I had a hard time falling asleep when I got home this morning. None of this would have been a problem except that I had to be somewhere in the afternoon. My sister Hope had driven home for the holiday weekend and I said that I would drive out there to visit. Sleeping late was no longer an option for me. Four hours was all that I got before I woke up and called to see what was going on at my parents' house. My dad said that Hope had been taken to the hospital with a suspected appendicitis. Obviously this put a slight damper on the party atmosphere and I said that I would be out there as soon as I finished showering. Then once I was there, we heard from my mom at the hospital who said that it wasn't appendicitis, but a kidney infection. Both my mom and Hope were on their way home, but Hope would have to return to the hospital the next day for more antibiotics. I think that this was the first time in months that all of my siblings and I had been at my parents' house at the same time. Trevor was back from Texas, Hope was back from Missouri, while Heather and I came from much closer points. It was a little odd to see all of us together, but then again this is what people do on a holiday weekend. Nineteen years old seems so distant to me and watching Hope is always something for me. She came home with her tongue pierced, which really doesn't surprise me. There were hints of it happening the last time that she was home. It makes sense when you are that young. Now I have to wonder when she'll get a tattoo. It would be the next logical step. It was when I was driving to work from my parents' house that I thought about what I was doing when I was nineteen. Ten years ago it was my last summer before college and many nights were spent drinking and smoking pot. We knew that our group would fall apart once school started, but that didn't stop us from tearing along the country roads at night in search of whatever we could find to do. We were young, free and stupid. Most of my friends from high school went to college in Madison, the hip school where exciting things happened all of the time, while I went to the much more rural and calm Stevens Point. In the beginning, I tried to keep the ties between us strong, but the Madison contingent partied much harder than I did when I was in college. Whenever I would visit them, it would be almost non-stop partying that left me completely drained. Their lifestyle was very harsh to me, but they didn't seem to mind. For them it was the only way to live. Inventing inane drinking games was a popular pastime for them and they would get more and more elaborate each time I saw them. Drinking for them was a fine art with the choice of drink changing from time to time. Naturally this behavior led to some rather unsanitary habits. For example when they partied in the basement they would urinate in the utility sink, rather than walk upstairs to the bathroom. Ashtrays and leftover food littered the rooms. Maybe this sounds like typical frat behavior, but they weren't in a frat. They just liked to party and be messy. Part of me loved the energy that I got from them, but at the same time, I knew that it couldn't do it and that it wouldn't last long for them either. Of course I was right and in the end the lifestyle did take its toll on the Madison contingent. Squabbling divided the group and they drifted apart. Dave O. was the one who was the most severely affected by the fallout. He was a smart burly farm boy, who also happened to have quite a few emotional problems. Unfortunately he tried to solve them with drugs with some therapy mixed in now and then. Over the course of his college career more and more of the Madison group started to avoid him. They would say that he was insane and tell me about his destructive outbursts, such as tearing telephones out of the wall and screaming at them. In the beginning, I thought that they were exaggerating until I got a taste firsthand of just how eerie he could be when he was high. I remember him driving his truck over metal fence posts just to prove that he could do it. Other times he would launch his body onto the hood of a car and laugh about it. The most frightening time was when he told me that he heard voices when he was high. He said that there were electrical impulses that affected his brain. At first I thought that he was joking, because it sounded too much like a cliche to me. Then I realized that he was serious and I didn't know what to do to help him. He had been sliding downhill for years and probably wouldn't stop until he hit the bottom. After I graduated from college, I lost contact with most of the Madison group, but not before I heard that Dave O. had tried to commit suicide. His method of choice was hanging and I think that it might have happened in the family barn, but I'm not sure because I never did get all of the details. I did, however, see him once at a store after this had happened and he seemed even more odd than I remembered. He looked like a person that had been completely crushed. The weak and disoriented person standing before me was not the intelligent person that I had known in high school. He was a stranger to me. I haven't seen him since and that was probably five years ago. When I was nineteen, Dan, Eric W., Dave O. and Dave P. were my world. All four of them were bright sarcastic and knew how to party. These were my drinking and pot-smoking companions. These were the people that I could trust. Time, however, changed everything for us. I walked away from most of that lifestyle ong before they did and we drifted apart. Now I only know where Dan lives and I haven't spoken to him in months. As much fun as I had at times, I would never want to be nineteen again. I don't think that life can be lived at that level of intensity for very long. It just isn't healthy. I am glad that I have the memories, but I don't want to repeat them. It's a part of me that I left behind.
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