once i asked you what moment you’d live in forever. we were sitting in a group with half a dozen people but i was looking at you, because that was the answer i was curious about. someone else had a picture-perfect answer: outside with her back on the grass among her closest friends, fireflies buzzing and music spilling from an overpriced speaker as they watched the stars. no one else could think of anything; it wasn’t just you. i thought of the question during a particularly good stretch, my muscles shifting around their bones, but i wouldn’t pick that moment. it’s a lot of pressure to place on a person, making them choose the expanse of time they want to spend the rest of their life in. fortunately we aren’t confronted with that decision.
tonight i went to a lorde concert. it was my second time seeing her, no less transcendent than the first, swaying against a wall of sound to melodies i’ve kept close to me since i was seven years old and royals was on the radio. my hair stuck to my face as i closed my eyes between solar power and the encore, my eyes closed as i soaked in the screams, blinking open only when i heard someone yell love. it’s my experience that people use concerts to yell about how much they love the performers. at first i thought it was strange. how can you love someone you’ve never met? how can you love someone you don’t know, how can you love when what you love is the music and the public image and not the person in front of you? i don’t think there’s just one type of love in the end. i think love for art is often accompanied by a love for the artist, however misguided, because feeling like someone understood you or helped you with what they created is reason enough to love. it’s not the same as loving your partner or your best friend or even your pet, but it’s love all the same and shouldn’t be disqualified.
if i could live in one moment forever i think i’d pick a concert. lorde quoted from a book tonight, saying that a character’s strangeness was alleviated by his presence in a crowd, and it was true. i’m standing in the audience tonight jumping and hearing my voice go hoarse and i felt less strange, even for just a bit, because here i was soaking up the music with everyone else. the staging of the solar power tour makes you feel like you’re being catapulted to another world, like you’re leaving this one behind in favour of a planet with a large yellow moon and a wild-haired woman singing her woes and wants into the microphone stand. it’s something different, something transcendent, something about the way any experience becomes holy when you can hear it in your bones and under your ribs.
lorde said something else i want to remember. she said that her music could be summarised by bodies and big emotions, that she sung about how feelings stuck in your body and shifted your cells. in honour of this she sung hard feelings for someone named spencer, which has been a favourite off melodrama for a while now. what i want music to be more than anything is visceral. i want the kind of music with its finger on your pulse and its melodies in your veins. i want songwriters to tell me about how heartbreak has infected them, how falling in love redeems them, how freedom is wind whistling through your teeth and throwing your arms up at one hundred kilometres an hour on a dead end road. feelings are so abstract; trapped behind generalisations and figures of speech. who cares whether you can explain your love away? tell me that words get caught in your throat until it hurts when he’s around and i’ll understand. wanting should be a physical thing. the mind has tenterhooks in the body and it digs in tight.
like i said before, this was my second time seeing lorde. the first time i went was with my mother, standing in a balcony watching her. someone in our row had an actual cande and i clutched my chest at all the heartbreak songs because i thought no one would ever want me enough to break my heart by leaving. pretty girls don’t know the things that i know. i screamed along to these words, i felt them grow like mould inside me, and tonight i smiled to every word of supercut because it didn’t hurt. do you know how wild that was for me? how wild and fluorescent and brand new it was to go to a concert and have nothing hurt? i had my head against my oldest’s friend’s before lorde came on and i could feel her words in my skull, and my chest was rattling with the effort of keeping all i wanted cooped up inside, and i almost cried into her hair because i like you so much. how ingenious it was for my life to change like this.
i’m thinking about the magic of a concert—a musician yelling about fucking things up; crowds of people singing along to the same lines, each with a different connection to the words; breaking the microphone for half a dozen minutes because the venue was flooded with noise; the lancing pain in my chest and neck when i dance too long without breathing. magic feels too small a word, too quaint and trivial, in a sense too simplistic to convey the joy that occurs. a moment you want to live in forever. i hate words that claim to be all-encompassing—forever, anything, everything, always—and yet i’ve used so many of them here, throwing them in my midnight stream of consciousness because i can’t quite think of others words to capture the spirit of what i mean. all of literature is translation; from blood and bone and sensation to careful lines of type that only grasp at what it means to experience.
what i’m getting at here (or, to use a phrase i’ve worn out over the course of evening: you know what i mean) is that four years ago i was standing next to my mother with mascara running down my cheeks because i was waiting for a green light, a sign to walk into the world and scramble for what i wanted. tonight i walked out of a concert hall into a brisk april chill with no coat, no sorrow, all drive and ache and excitement, i suppose.
if i had to choose a moment to live in forever, tonight is in the running.