There is a moment in between each bite where time stops. You do not focus on the meal. You stop thinking about your life. You let your worries drift away. The only thing that matters is the bite. That bite of pure unaltered flavor. The fat, the salt, the sweet, the bitter, and the sour, blending together into the perfect bite. Suddenly, you awaken and realize this is the best meal you have ever eaten.

Let me tell you about the best meal I ever ate: It all began in a quiet Floridian sports bar. As fate would weave, this was no ordinary sports bar. This sports bar offered the savoriest flavor-filled, spice-seduced buffalo wings on the planet. At the time, my brother and I loved nothing else but chicken wings. Myself, my brother, and a small group of friends decided to take on this culinary landmark. This restaurant had a cool twist to their wing flavors. Hurricane categories divided the flavors of the wings. Now, there are five stages to a hurricane. The stages of hurricanes increase in increments of wind speed of about twenty miles per hour per increment. However, when it comes to choosing wing flavors, if your options are between how deadly a hurricane can be, you would think that no one would choose anything above a category three. A category five hurricane is a hurricane with wind speeds of over 157 mph. Who in their right mind would be willing eat something described as a category five hurricane? Innocent, ignorant, adolescent children want to eat a category five hurricane. I was once an ignorant, adolescent child who ate one of the most powerful forces of nature on a chicken wing.

Did you ever notice that your initial reaction to a menu usually decides your potential experience at the restaurant? You go out to eat at a three-star Michelin restaurant. You are given a specific, daily prepared menu sometimes in a leather-bound portfolio written in gilded pen over a Jackson Pollock signed by Picasso. You go out to eat at Applebee’s. You are given a dirty, laminated menu that hasn’t been cleaned since it was printed out at Kinkos. When I was given the menu to this restaurant, I should have taken it as a grave warning. The menu was made from what I can only describe as stiff paper towel with visible water marks on it. Disposable menus are never a good sign. You must ask yourself, why do these menus need to be disposable? What would cause these menus to be unusable at the end of this meal? Soon I would discover the fate of these menus first hand.

I gazed at the menu, scanning each flavor-filled category, mouthwatering at the potential of each flavor combination. I kept reading down the paper menu as the color behind the options shifted from a friendly mother nature green to a deep, dark brewing red. It was here that I first viewed my destruction. The category five wings seemed to jump off the page at me. To this day, I do not remember ordering the wings. All I know was I must have of looked like the most ballsy, or the dumbest, kids this waiter had ever seen. Here I was, a proud, overconfident, little brat that could not possibly know what my tiny body could handle. I ordered the hottest possible wings on menu, probably named something like, “Dante’s favorite." However, they should have had a smaller text beneath it like, “Please, for your sake, do not choose me. The hottest part of hell’s inferno multiplied by ten and transformed into sauce is baby food compared to this concentrated nuclear lava.” Unfortunately, there were no warnings from the staff. I can only hope that the waiter was secretly in on this cruel joke. Like, he got excited when a small child ordered the hottest sauce ever conceived by man. I imagine him secretly watching the entire time and laughing as my smiley innocence was unaware the happy train I was riding was about to go off a cliff into the center of the sun.

The fifteen minutes I waited after ordering were my last moments of blissful toddler-hood. Before the waiter brought the wings, I caught a scent. A slight tinge of pain filled my nostrils from over my shoulder. A deep, echoing cry of the souls lost to the black pits filled my being as I first doubted my resolve. The scent continued to burn my nostrils as I caught hints of roasted garlic powder, dashes of Worcestershire sauce, crushed habanero chile, stone ground ghost peppers, and an unfamiliar scent of dew dipped Trinidad Scorpion powder. The waiter slowly put the basket of wings over my shoulder into my sight. My eyes filled with water as the moisture in the air seemed to be sucked into the dark depths of the chicken. Through my tear-filled eyes, I noticed my second glaring warning not to consume the hell-fire before me. The waiter was wearing gloves. If the waiter must wear gloves to even carry the wings to the table, then why am I even expected to touch these netherworld nuggets with my bare hands.

I hardly remember my first bite. Everything was now a daze of pain and deep regret. I do remember my last bite. I could not feel my face by that point. My brother and I had gone through two rolls of paper towels and five separate menus wiping the tears, snot, droll, and sanity from our faces. We laughed through the endless sobs over our wings. The only comfort was in the knowing we were both experiencing the same pain. We hugged and tried to crack jokes in between each wing. We bonded like we never had up until that point. We had a good ten-minute laughing and weeping session where you get to that point you can’t breathe anymore and you just hold your stomach in pain as you make noiseless gurgles trying to form words though the heaving. We lost a member of our party to the accidental excrement of solids into his trousers. Another bowed out when his mother came to pick him up. However, my brother and I remained on the course to finish all eight wings. Our poor bodies could only imagine the pain later as the wings made their way through our digestive system. My brother and I left the restaurant changed youths ready to take on the culinary world of heat. As we waddled to our car carrying moist towelettes, I realized something special had just taken place. It was in that endorphin-overdosed ecstasy of a moment, that I knew that was the best meal I’ve ever ate.