09.23.2002 - 12:19 p.m.

I would like to describe my weekend, in particular a concert from Friday night. But it occurs to me that everybody already knows about that kind of feeling, when words like wonder and awe and perfection fail you, too empty to describe why you almost cry where people can see. I won�t try to describe that part of it all. You will just have to trust that it was there, blanketing everything else.

So what can I share here? It was cold. I was sitting somewhere near where the AC came out, on the floor for most of it because we hadn�t come early enough. I cramped my neck trying to look past a column the whole night.

Sometimes I gave the muscles a rest and looked out at the audience. Sitting on the side as I was, I could look down a whole row. They were all rocking, mouthing words, bobbing their heads in approximate time with the beat. Not one of them cared about anything but the music. That feeling I�m not describing, it has its roots in that kind of freedom.

Sometimes ultimate frisbee or a good conversation will make my cheeks hurt from smiling, but I had never noticed before how quickly I can feel, how short the distance can be between a thought and its expression on my face.

Her guitar�s face caught the lights from the ceiling, and in their reflections I could see the tracemarks of surface scratches and the dull area where the soft inside of her arm had rubbed the finish off. I thought of long hours of practice, and of what the guitar must have done to the arm and fingers in return.

It put me in mind of all sorts of beauty I have not yet chosen to pay for.

She told us to shout out requests, which everyone did, to the point where it was almost impossible to decipher what any of them were. I did not ask for mine, and it turned out that she didn�t play it. I don't know if I stayed quiet out of shyness, or because I didn't really want to hear it, but in either case I didn't mind. It�s one of what she would call her �depressing songs,� but I don�t think they are depressing. They are just songs that appreciate the price of things.

And I bought cds, even though I could have burned them from my friends� copies, and I did talk to her, a few halting sentences about how great it all was, but I don�t think I even wanted to do that. I just thought she ought to know that she had moved me. I would have wanted to see, if I were in her place. I didn�t ask her to sign anything. I don�t know her, and a scrawled line of sharpie isn�t going to change that. I certainly don�t need anything more to remember the night by.

I need periodic doses of the perfect feeling from that night. I need to think there is some place for the overwhelmingly beautiful. I always wished to be part of a song or one of those great stories; I always wanted to feel that ending resolution, to know that I was part of something so much greater than myself.

But I am, you know. What I keep forgetting is that all the pain and turmoil and confusion that surrounds the sheer joy, all of that together IS the resolution. That�s why you can�t describe the perfect, because you never want to think that perfect includes the sore neck, the fact that your brake pads died on the way there, or the secret sadness that you are still alone. We are too in love with happily ever after.

Because there can be no strength in happily ever after; there would be no choices left to make. Pure happiness is not really what I want. I want here, now.

I want everything.

-stonebridge

previous | next