Aurora 2021 Mag

Braden Kelsey

how much cooler it had gotten, but the lights went dark. *

This game doesn’t necessitate reason, it doesn’t beckon for my mastery. It is for me to experience, not possess and abuse; it’s a surrender to the irrational to find joy. It is not to just feel amongst the crowd but to be the dirt beneath their feet—to be the cracks and fissures expanding with the stomping of rubber boots on grated metal to the deep resonating sounds of music and harmony. It is your mother seeing life in her son’s eyes again, a father given redemption, your standing by your wife to mourn the death of the marriage. It is an opportunity and it is a hardship—release and pressure, exhale, inhale. It is movement; the spirit glides through a purple hallway lined in orange brick and it wonders why it goes but it mustn’t! It must reach a dead end and decide to stop searching for what’s been looking for it—to rather be guided by that which it doesn’t understand. Stone walkways are lined with trees who wear their leaves as dresses cascading down to the grass and dew. Stairwells wrap around a skyscraper all the way to the top where Saladin’s eagle bears the body of a man crucified, hovered over by the vigil of a golden cobra and the burning sun. * We huddled in a circle, the four of us. We wanted to be as close together when it started as possible to share the same joy. A gong rang and rippled the air around us. After a spoken intro, the instruments tore through the darkness and light filled every inch of the crowd like an explosion. My friends went flying off in their own directions, a couple feet this way and some the other, jumping and screaming every word as if the alternative was death. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even look. I leaned over the railing with my eyes closed, and shook my head back and forth to the rhythm in total disbelief. Every note was right—the songs a soundtrack to my thoughts, playing me through a battle long overdue. I remembered our stoic soldier and opened my eyes to look for him. The lights were going out and coming back to the crashes of sound, and in the split second when they would dim, he would reach back as if he were trying to grab a chair he was sitting in. When the lights would flash bright again, he would throw his arms above the person in front of him and at the stage, reaching and reaching and reaching desperately for an inch closer to the music. I closed my eyes again, and remained that way for the entirety of the concert. I didn’t see a thing, but I caught all the sound.

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