- "This is too dangerous. You're gonna hurt yourself."

- "Stop that nonsense before you end up in the hospital, or worse, hurt someone else."

- "Get out of here, it's private property."

- "Go get a job instead of acting like a child.”

- “You'll end up paralysed."

- and my favourite: "Did they really do that?"

You hear a lot of things when you're out in the streets jumping.

Bewilderment, colourful advice and well-meaning insults.

But that doesn't stop me - I know that the boys are out tonight.

When I arrive, training has begun.

They leap, chaotic herd of cats jumping from wall to wall, landing on small bars, vaulting over the void. You see four walls and a flight of stairs - they see endless possibilities.

The city is their playground. The streets are where they forge themselves. The concrete rips open their clothes and etches itself in their skin, the unholy stigmata turning into silver scars that they show their parents with repentance and their peers with pride.

And they fly, and they twist, and they fall, golden in the dimming sunlight and the certainty that they can outrun death.

The oldest just turned thirty, the youngest has barely learned to walk - youth is insolent and raucous, and it will fly unless you cut its wings. They teach me when I struggle just because that's what it means to be part of them, and others did it for them before. Humility is easy in the face of kindness.

Sweat drips down their bare skin, adorns the tattoos on their backs with beads, the display of their exertion is a big "fuck you" to anyone who can't even dream that bodies can move like that.

One of them jumps. It's a perfect arc over the crowd that is, in that moment, completey silent. As one, we hold our breath, and time suspends itself to see if the jumper will make it.

Here, the measure of virility is how much of **yourself** you give. In this world **blood** is a badge of honour, and the only failed jump is the one you did not dare to make.

Fear takes away agency, and the chance to get better. It slowly takes hold of your limbs and weaves its paralytic web around your throat until it closes up. So they battle it, they toss and turn for the right to keep breathing**.**

There is respect for those who succeed, because they pay the price of **discipline** - there is respect for those who **fail**, because they pay the price of **commitment**. Commitment, definition: to stop being tied down by what is or isn't possible.

Is it dangerous? Danger is a biblical beast that will aim for your gut if you flinch. Taming it is a miracle that the boys perform by religiously sharpening their skills, drilling their mouvements until they master them with the precision of watchmakers. They pray by spitting in their hands and rubbing them on the soles of their shoes - eliminating dust is eliminating the risk.

The jumper gets to the other side. The silence is broken by a joyful roar - he made it. I roar with them because I AM one of the boys - how do you call the opposite of toxic masculinity again?

And they fight, those golden boys, they fight for the right to keep the hold on that stupid, senseless, childish feeling of the concrete under their feet and the sky at their fingertips.

They fight for it because it cascades through their fingers like sand, every day bringing them closer to the ground so, of course they want to jump higher.

They are misfits, outcasts and weirdos, the kind who skips school and comes back with a broken arm to work once a month. They lost faith in everything that is not themselves because a lot of them never had a choice. Their cathedral of concrete has heard all their anger and all their frustration for a world that urges them to grow up. When you ask them what they want to be, they say “pffff… famous?”.

They're a pack of young wolves who prey on freedom on the daily - but they’re only scary because they hunt the gods and it seems that, if you let them, they could eat the sun.

The boys are out tonight in their torn trousers and bruised skin. They are out in their youth and their burning dreams. And they are. Stupidly. Beautiful.