The lights dimmed and all eyes set on me. My knees wobbled in uncertainty and my throat went drier than the Sahara. I grabbed the microphone with my sweaty palms and focused on the music around me. The beat was familiar but the words couldn’t come, my brain buzzed in panic. When I heard the start of my song my lips started to move. I heard something that resembled my voice and my confidence grew. I tapped my converse on the wooden stage, finding my groove.
My voice echoed off the walls of the auditorium, my eyes closed in bliss. The world stopped and there was only me and my music. 'What a wonderful feeling!' I thought as beads of sweat formed on my brow. My body moved in the nameless pattern of beat and rhythm. Like so many before me I fell in love as my lips formed the vowels of ecstasy. I was music and no one could stop me in my moment of forever.
The people didn’t matter, life didn’t matter, and most of all time didn’t matter. But my song soon ended, and the people cheered. They saw what I felt and they wanted what I had. But did they know that now the pain came? The worst part of music is the emptiness that it leaves behind. I longed for feelings once felt and the endless time. The stage now empty and bear with the loss of the music. My dress clung to my tired frame and I planned the next day, always waiting for the music.
But as my converse click clacked on the hardwood, a feeling overcame me. The beat, it poured through my ears as my feet moved on the floor below. A sense of awareness like nothing I had ever known. I understood …I knew something that was only true. As this feeling grew my voice called to the beat. Poking and prodding but never taming the thing it can only meet. A tear slid down my pale cheek, but not in the pain of emptiness but in the once rare bliss. I walked and walked now hearing the beat of the world.