A Wrinkle in Time

No narcotics in my brain can make this go away

There used to be a time when ecstasy was just a bar of chocolate away. Or cradled in the arms of a favourite aunt. Or nestled inside shiny gift-wrapping paper. In the company of "bestest friends", at birthday parties, family vacations, within the pages of a gripping novel. In devouring grandmum's stories, and wrestling over chess and '28' with granddads. Ultimately, in effusing utterly benign, guileless, childish idiocy.

Add a decade or so, and watch time hiccup, leap, bound, and change the flavour of ecstasy entirely. Alien and unrecognisable, but ecstasy, doubtless. To be discovered - no, stumbled upon - in the unlikeliest of places -- Within the first few bars of a desperately gloomy, manically adored song, hidden within three sentences of the most beautiful piece of prose you'll ever read. All alone at the edge of a cliff, with nothing but The Great Below at your feet and the icy wind for company. In a sudden glance, a flash of the bluest eyes you'll ever see. Beneath the layers of a knowing, secret smile, a quiet conspiracy, an unassumingly fearless compliment. In stretching out under a million stars in the middle of nowhere, in an unexpected glimpse of a brash, full moon on your way home from work, in tightly clutched fistfuls of sand, surrounded by a painfully beautiful sunset, or smothered under thick, grey, heavy skies. And in complete affirmation of slavish faith -- in music, a band, a friend, a plan, a fearful hope. Intangible, unpredictable, transient scraps and bits of ecstasy, capricious, incompletely formed, as unreliable, and yet as terrifyingly precious as those solid ecstasies of childhood.