The Texas night was thick with everything Mark hated. The heat clung to his skin like a second layer, sticky and oppressive. The scent of scorched wood, spilled beer, and cheap cologne saturated the air, mixing into something that made him want to shower it all off and scrub his memory clean while he was at it. A bonfire at the center of the clearing blazed too high to be safe, but no one cared. It roared like a creature trying to be heard above the din of laughter, shouted toasts, and the heavy thump of predictable music.
Mark perched on the tailgate of a truck, nursing the same beer he'd opened an hour ago. He wasn't drinking it, not really. It was just armor. Something to hold so no one asked if he was okay, or why he looked like he'd rather be anywhere else.
He hated these parties—always had. But to refuse the invitation entirely felt like stepping off the planet. So he showed up. He always showed up. Quiet, reserved, drifting on the edges of the herd like a ghost in jeans and a flannel that didn't quite fit.
He watched the fire, eyes reflecting the flickers of gold and orange, and tried to imagine he was somewhere else. Not here. Not in this town with its suffocating predictability, its recycled ambitions passed down like hand-me-down clothes: play varsity, get a trade, marry someone you met in high school, raise kids who do the same. It felt like a life already lived before he'd had a chance to write his own.
The music was garbage, too. Just another string of truck-bed love songs and dirt-road fantasies, every lyric a reminder of the same narrow future he was expected to want. He could predict the chorus before it hit, could mouth along to the words he didn't care about. It was all a loop—one he didn't want to be part of anymore.
Then everything changed.
The playlist stuttered. Someone had taken over.
Mark barely looked up until the fire's soundtrack was interrupted by a brief, clean electronic chime. Silence fell for half a second, rare and sharp as shattered glass. Then—
A different sound.
Not a fiddle, not an acoustic guitar. A synth. A shimmering, synthetic pulse—bright and deliberate, like a heartbeat made of glass. Mark's attention snapped into focus so fast it was like someone had clapped directly in his face.
The song was foreign here. Alien. And perfect.
He turned just slightly to see who had made the switch. A girl—Aubrey, maybe?—was fiddling with her phone beside the cooler, looking more interested in the fire than the song she'd just launched. But she'd done it. She'd summoned this into the middle of nowhere.
Then came the voice.
It wasn't the gruff, twangy growl that usually dominated this kind of scene. This voice was clearer, sharper, younger—but there was weight in it. Pain and resolve, but something else too. Hunger. It wasn't begging to be liked. It was daring to be heard.
"What if, what if we run away?
What if, what if we left today?"
Mark froze. Not just his body, but something deeper. Like time had fractured, splitting off into a version of this moment where he had choices. The words didn't feel like lyrics. They felt like prophecy.
He'd asked himself those exact questions more times than he could count. Alone in his room. In the pages of half-filled notebooks. In dreams that took place on subway platforms and crowded city blocks, in art schools he hadn't dared apply to, in lives he hadn't dared live.
"What if we said goodbye to safe and sound?"
He didn't move, didn't blink. He was afraid the moment would vanish if he did.
The fire was still there. The crowd still laughed. The beer still sloshed in red cups. But suddenly, the entire field felt… rewired. Like someone had punched a hole in the reality he'd resigned himself to, and a different version of it was seeping in through the crack.
Then the chorus hit.
"My youth, my youth is yours—
A truth so loud you can't ignore…"
It slammed into him like a revelation.
He'd thought it was a love song, maybe. The first few bars made it seem like that. But now—now it felt like a revolution. A battle cry wrapped in synth and verse. A message scrawled on the wall of his soul in ink only he could read.
It wasn't about giving his youth to someone. It was about owning it.
Mark sat upright, heart pounding. The song gave him something he hadn't realized he was missing until that very moment: permission. Permission to imagine something more. Permission to refuse. To say no. To walk away from the parties, the traditions, the map of his life someone else had already drawn.
It wasn't that he suddenly had a plan. It was just that—for the first time—he could see one.
He reached into his pocket with fingers that trembled just slightly, opened his music app, and held the phone up. He didn't even check to see who was watching. It didn't matter anymore.
The waveform danced on screen. The app paused, then answered.
Alex Vance – "Youth."
The name blazed across the screen like a flare.
He tapped the save icon without thinking. It felt like carving something into stone. He had it now. A song. A name. A direction.
He didn't even realize he was smiling until the next track started and the spell broke. Someone changed it again, back to a country remix, and the party picked up where it had left off. But Mark wasn't there anymore. Not really.
The fire was still hot, the beer still stale, but none of it touched him. Something had shifted inside him, a quiet realignment. He looked out past the trucks, past the treeline, toward the expanse of the sky that stretched above them all like a great, blank canvas.
It no longer felt like a ceiling.
It felt like an opening.
A beginning.
He took a breath, then another. His lungs felt clearer. His spine straighter.
He didn't say goodbye to anyone when he slipped off the tailgate and started walking toward the road. No one noticed, and that was fine. They'd still be telling the same jokes when the fire died down. Still chasing the same shadows.
But Mark? He was chasing something else now.
And it had a sound. A pulse. A name.
Alex Vance.
He had found his anthem. And with it, a way out.