Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 23: Chapter 23

Read chapter 23 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I have played on a lot of stages. I have played in small rooms where the audience was close enough that I could see their faces clearly, every expression, every shift. I have played on stages large enough that the people at the back were shapes rather than faces, present but indistinct, a warmth in the dark rather than individual human beings. I have played in the rain, once, at an outdoor festival where the crowd stayed through all of it because some things are worth getting wet for. I have played at a competition at seventeen with a bleeding hand and a partner beside me who held the song on a single thread while I found my way back to it. Every stage has its own particular silence before the music starts. Its own quality of waiting. This one, tonight, felt like all of them at once. We opened with three songs. Not the one. These were the warm up, for the audience and for me, the songs that had come in the years since, built in studios and rehearsal rooms and once memorably on a night train between cities when the melody arrived without warning and I had forty minutes to chase it down before my stop. Good songs. Honest songs. Songs that had found their audiences and been given back warmth and recognition in return. The hall received them the way a good hall does, generously, the two thousand people in it breathing together, swaying together, the low roar between songs of a crowd that is inside something rather than watching it from outside. I watched them from the stage and felt what I always felt in those moments. Gratitude, plain and unperformed, the kind that sits quietly in the chest without needing to announce itself. Then the fourth song. I stepped back from the microphone. My band settled into the stillness that meant we were changing gears. The guitarist set down his instrument and moved to keys. The others found their new positions. The stage went quiet in a way that was different from the pauses between songs, more deliberate, more weighted. The hall felt it. The conversation that had been running low in the seats went quiet on its own, without being asked. Two thousand people choosing silence again, the same collective decision as before, something in the air telling them that what was coming required it. I walked back to the microphone. I looked out into the warm dark. "This next song," I said, "is the first one I ever played that was not my own. Someone else wrote the words. I found the melody. We built it together in a clearing above a river on cold February mornings, piece by piece, until it became something neither of us could have made alone." The hall was very quiet. "I have been playing it for seven years. Every version of it has been for her. Tonight is no different." I let that sit for a moment in the silence. Then I nodded once to my band. And we began. The opening was just the guitar. The same four bars it had always been, finding the shape of the thing before anything else arrived. But seven years of playing had deepened it, given it a weight and a sureness that the seventeen year old version had not had. The notes were the same. The hands that played them were not. The keys came in underneath, warm and full, the same register the keytar had occupied on a school stage seven years ago. I had worked with my keyboardist for weeks to find the exact quality of it, the specific warmth that sat underneath without overwriting, that gave the song a foundation without making it heavy. And then I sang. I wanna be a victim, I wanna have conviction I wanna be the hero, I wanna be the villain I wanna be a savior, I wanna be a killer I wanna go on adventure, I wanna seek my pleasure Oh-oh... My voice in the hall. The hall taking it the way the clearing had always taken sound, completely, without echo, like the space had been built for exactly this. I had sung these words a hundred times in seven years. In rehearsal rooms, in recordings, alone in my apartment at two in the morning when the melody arrived and needed som