You Tell Me

Well, it’s been a while but music has come to life one more time. Dim room, flashy lights flood the stage before the show begins. People everywhere, chatting, greeting – some more formal than others, some more sober than others. But the evening is still young and spirits are still tamed. Funny how they get untamed when the clock is close to a later strike. At a boom of minute, speakers begin to blare and the crowd gets all warmed up. It’s a flocking movement towards the stage and suddenly the crowd is there. So effortlessly do people get together on such occasions and at a really slow pace do they repeat the action under different circumstances. But it’s a night of letting go, of getting out (of yourself as well) and  giving in to the music. That togetherness has to me nothing different than the togetherness a sports stadium shares. It must be the inciting thought that a mass of people are there for the same purpose. A sort of walking together feeling.  And that equality of purpose serves as a pretty good identity fader. 

You’re no longer yourself in the crowd, you don’t stand out like you used to, but the mere participation to the crowd makes you a tiny limb of the gigantic body, a steadily changing organism whose flow and go is the only constancy. Some come in, other get out. But wait, individuality comes to the surface to the beat of music. One chord here, one chord there, one goes up, one goes down and mysteriously a harmonious sound forms, floats through the air, molds the crowd and regulates irregular motions crossing the crowd like a uniformly spread wave. But there are voices that want to be heard and drinks that want to be spilt. And there is hardly any air to breathe. Let alone the space in-between. Or a lot of reason; the thin strand of consciousness linking the dimness of the evening to the light of the mind. But it’s still a crowd and you’re so close but a thousand miles away. And there are thousands of reasons that keep you drenched in a swamp of awkwardness, beneath the crust of friendliness; for the most part, it’s reasons I don’t rhyme with, but I resume to swallow as if an invisible fire is being consumed. Whichever the reasons, they remain coated in a cold crust of diffidence and mistrust. For a crust will always be a crust. Unless you crush it.