It had already started about fifteen minutes ago. He could hear sound, loud and reverberating, outside the building reminding him he was late. He hastily entered the glass doors, and then paused. He needed a second to get used to the light. It was quite a contrast to the dark, stormy night he was seeking refuge from. His eyes adjusted, pupils growing smaller, and he was finally able to make his way inside where the music was coming from. He moved quickly up the aisle, not wanting to draw attention to himself, and sat in the nearest available spot. As it was the only place empty, he wondered if he had come just in time.
He was just far enough from the front to prevent him from clearly making out the features of the singers. A tall, handsome man, very stylishly dressed was standing in the middle, and behind him too his sides were the two other vocalists. The lady on the right was somewhat serious, and appeared as if she had done this for a long time. The girl on the left seemed a bit new to it, and she had a sort of nervous excitement. In the far left of the three sections, the late arriver watched detachedly, as if seeing for the millionth time a rabbit being pulled out of a hat.
He paused for a second, pulling his eyes from following the nicely polished beams and allowing them to take a look around him.
The crowd was large and persuasive, mouthing every word with the three, almost instinctively as if the action required no thought. He was just far enough to the left to be behind the section of the stage where the band played, closer to the audience than the singers were. He noticed the overhead lights focused on the drummer move a bit, distracting him for only a second. The particularly multi-angled lighting on the audience was broken by the balcony railings above him, and the shadows fell in thin clean lines across his bench, as if slicing the dark sections out of a piece of fruit and leaving him seated in a narrow shadow.
The picture in front of him seemed to be flat, not real at all, like a movie playing out in front of him at a theatre. He seemed very detached, and he blamed it on the distance. The actual music itself, though sounding to him as equally surreal, filled up the auditorium with its empty chords. The audience must not have felt the same way, as their very bodies swayed back and forth reacting to the message of hope and escape that the tune brought. One particular young man, not much younger than he, but young enough to matter, was particularly enveloped by the music, and as shadows covered his face he wondered if the boy would as well. would ever know. would ever feel. would ever learn, if anyone would tell him and if he would have wanted to know after he knew. A sudden thought struck him, but by the time he turned to pass it on, it had slipped his mind, and he realized it was rather futile anyway, seeing as there was no one there to pass it too.
The reflection of the light on the crashing symbol reached just the right spot in the crowd to land on his eyes, temporarily blinding him and bringing him back to his surroundings. It seemed to him that this whole production was sort of like a like something unexplainable and magical, something you can’t live with or without.
His mind once again resigned itself to wandering, leaving the music behind as if in another world. It suddenly struck him that he wasn’t quite sure why he had even come, or who it was he was looking for. Before he realized it he was outside between the large room where the band played and the glass doors that led him out. He paused for just a second wandering how he got there, and then as abruptly as he entered, he exited the glass doors, returning to the dark night where the clouds had moved just a bit, taking with them the rain and revealing a sliver of the moon in the dark, blue sky.
