He changed it all for Us

It's dark and hot and the air is crackling around us. We all know what's about to happen, that's why we're here, together, waiting... because while we're in here, squished together and excited, it doesn't matter who can see us.

Everyone wants that moment when they don't have to hide or withhold for fear of being laughed at or called a freak. Everyone wants that moment and ours is now.

Not all moments are like this one, there are times when I sit and bite back everything I want to say because fitting in and being yourself don't always go hand in hand. Sitting in a room full of people I call friends can make you question what honesty really is, it can make you think about whether hiding parts of the truth is the same as lying. The itch to express that concealed part of my being can become overwhelming at times and I throw myself completely into any form of release from the constant restraints of belonging. This is when I work, I create, I imagine.

And then there are lights, flashing, illuminating, sparking with the electricity in the air and catching on the red of his hair and the blue of his suit. Noise shakes through me in waves and the floor shakes under the hundreds of feet jumping upon it and right now, pressed between a gangly blonde haired boy and a girl with bubble gum streaks through her long ponytail, I've never felt like I had more room to breathe.

Then he's singing and the entire building collapses around me. The walls aren't holding us in anymore and the sky above us, midnight and spectacular, is just clear enough that you can catch the occasional glimpse of stars.

"Voices hearing you loud

We're taking the sound back with us!"

Truly that's all we want. Someone to hear us and like what we have to say. Someone to listen and enjoy listening. Someone who understands.

We are real now, none of us are lying (however you define it) and they're the greatest seconds of our lives so far.

Minutes pass, songs begin and end and the longer we stand there the harder it becomes to think about going back to how things were before. It's harder to want to hide even though we know from collective experience that hiding is easier, because now we know what it's like to be completely free and we can't think of a way to return from that.

I didn't always hide, that came later after the yeas of being honest and ridiculed. When you're 9 and all you do is doubt (your family, your friends, yourself) people only tell you that everything will work out in the end. They don't tell you how or when the end is, they just tell you that it will.

The first time you do it it doesn't feel like anything significant, just a twisting or events or embellishment of a story and it's easy, but then you keep going until one day you wake up and you're buried under the mountain of words you tweaked. One at a time they're almost insignificant but when you change lots of little things what you're really doing is creating one big new thing and it gets hard to draw lines between what's real and what's not.

So you stop trying.

The floor is shaking again there are a multitude of voices signing back the words to that's captivating man before us. Cameras are flashing, hands are being thrown into the air, all of us are moving together towards the moments that will make us who we are.

Then it's over and the stage is empty and the lights are on again, the buzz is still hovering in the air but it's accompanied by murmurs now, the mumblings of people who had never met before tonight and may never see one another again. That's why these moments are precious, because they're trapped in the in between spaces, not quite friends but certainly not strangers. How can we call each other strangers when these are the people who we trust whole heartedly, before we even know them, to accept us for who we truly are and who we cannot be with anyone else.

I'm outside again now, it's over, that moment of pure perfection has passed and once again I'm hiding. But it's not as weighty now because a tiny portion of that mountain is being carried by those not-at-all-strangers in opposite directions into the night.