Aurora 2021 Mag

Braden Kelsey

fill our convenient 100 years with destructive cultural standards and our pockets with some faceless stranger’s porcelain hands—the same stranger to whom I’ve sold my body and the bodies of our neighbors in exchange for permission to live freely in irony. The same game where we die at the end—in which we’ve coasted below our best. Where our backs ache at 20 and freedoms are out of education, but everyone‘s feedback is valid. Where we must care, and forgive the fact that we had to live in order to find peace. Were we not all playing the same game? * When the Pumas left, we took our spots amongst the sorry grass, settling a few feet from each other and bowing our heads to shade our faces. Between sets, the crowd dispersed in streams looking for water. We sat in silence, each encouraging ourselves internally that we didn’t need comfort, and that we weren’t going to vomit. We found energy in watching a little man, a body no doubt riddled with drugs, dance sporadically in the grass before us to no music—a tattoo across his back of Jesus Christ holding in one hand the feet of a lamb lying atop his holy shoulders, and an AK-47 in the other. We decided to rise from the grass and move up near the railing before the area started filling out again, and we settled into the gaps of shade on the ground. The railing was chest high and stood atop feet-wide and ground-flush metal bases which were cool but grated. I asked the group if they’d seen the towering man in the other crowd. He was across the center walkway, a path that security and sound technicians used which divided the crowd into two cone shapes which expanded back to the venue entrance and narrowed towards the front of the stage, where the walkway opened up like a “T” and guards stood protecting the performers. Priya, Shane’s wife, had seen the giant as well—an odd figure, hunched and maladjusted. Through each set, he leaned against the barrier unenthused and with a lit cigarette between his finger tips, waiting for something. Leon Bridges came out as the sun set the sky pink, as a cloud meticulously put it to bed. The stoic soldier was unmoved. I promised that when My Morning Jacket—the main act—came out, he would be grasping that same railing like he was going to upend it—the same way you would shoot a basketball behind your head. The sun sunk deeper below the horizon, turning the sky a final golden-orange before drifting away, and with the growing darkness came anticipation. The stage lights illuminated the crowd so everybody could move around and have conversations. I leaned over the rail and blew smoke, feeling like a New York greaser and watching the crew set the stage as the sky turned a deep and unbreakable black. I turned to my friends to mention

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