Childhood's End

There was a moment, thirty-four years ago, when my life changed in an instant. It wasn't until much later that I noticed, but it was that transition from carefree child to worried adult that makes a nice, clean line for us to describe the rest of my life.
I was no longer indestructible. I had to start thinking about consequences. I had to consider that life is fragile and should be cherished. Not chewed up and spit out.
Because I had been very much of that school. And when I say "school," it is possible that it did not help to be meandering about  of one of the "top ten party campuses" in the United States. Anecdotally, I am sure that there are plenty of universities across the globe that have a reputation for "partying," but only in the U.S.A. do we feel a need to rank them.
I had been living what could have been described as a risky lifestyle. Getting a degree was not the primary concern in front of me. It would be hard to say exactly what my primary concern was, other than the aforementioned "partying."
And when my friend and roommate died in that accident, one might have expected that I would have taken that as a sign. Stop. Yield. Caution, maybe. Nope. I didn't even slow down. If anything, the denial of death caused me to plunge still deeper into hedonism. I cannot definitively speak for my other friend and roommate who survived, but I can imagine that we were looking for the bottom. As frightened and depressed as we were, there had to be a place where we could go that didn't remind us that we were still alive.
Turns out, it wasn't at the bottom of a bottle or up our nose. We looked. We wallowed around where we were, and then we took our collective show out on the road. Mine ended one early morning in a Mesa, Arizona parking lot. That's when I reached that Full Stop. That instant had finally caught up to me. The suggested irony of dying in a car with only myself and the chemicals I poured into me to blame was lost. Forever. There was no fun anymore.
I was going to have to try something else.
I chose the rest of my life. It's been a pretty good choice.