Unparalleled concert scene

On a bland Thursday night, in the boredom of checking my phone while eating, my roommate and I had an impromptu idea and decided to buy tickets to go to the Coldplay concert three days later.

I pride myself on being a free-wheeling person, and sometimes it is inevitable to do things with "three minutes of heat". But this time, the sudden interest did not dissipate with the passage of time, but gradually accumulated to an exciting climax in the few days waiting for the concert to arrive.

Thinking about it carefully, it has been more than two years since the last time I went to a live concert because of the epidemic. Finally, on Sunday evening, when I was sitting in the car-hailing car, looking out the window of the stadium not far away, a long-lost throbbing came to my heart, and I couldn’t help but start to thank this decision on a whim.

After all, it is a stadium that can accommodate tens of thousands of people. Before we got off the expressway, we were stuck in a long queue of traffic. Fortunately, with the company of roommates and headphones, the time in traffic jams does not seem long. The slow-moving process was like a deliberately slowed-down movie. I looked at the stadium that was getting closer and closer, and counted the countdown frame by frame.

Although I had a rough idea of ​​the grand occasion in the stadium when I was stuck in traffic, when I actually stepped into the stadium, I still paused unconsciously.

"Many, many people" was the first thought that came to mind. It's been so long since the pandemic that I've seen so many people that at that moment, "a lot" alone wasn't enough to express my inner shock. The warm-up guests on the stage were already singing hard, and their singing reverberated in the crowded stadium through high-power speakers. My roommates and I were walking through unfamiliar crowds, trying to find our own stand. People passing by were holding cold beer and hot dogs, eating, drinking, talking and laughing, and the hot popularity rushed to their faces. Suddenly, they seemed to be back before the epidemic, as if nothing had changed.

Unfortunately, I am well aware that everything is indeed different from two years ago. Facing the dense crowd, I instinctively felt a little flustered, and I felt a little bit at a loss. After being seated, I took out the "equipment" from my bag, and put on a layer of N95 on the outside of the ordinary medical mask that I had worn all the way. With double insurance, I felt calm.

After two layers of masks, breathing seemed a little dull, and the rope on my ears hurt a little, but these slight discomforts were all forgotten the moment the concert started. The spotlights were on, and the stage was filled with smoke. Crisp guitars and raspy bass are joined by strong, heart-pounding drum beats, creating an unstoppable wave of sound like a rushing river. The crowd began to boil, and wave after wave of screams swept me like a tidal wave.

Different performances have different ways of watching. For example, when watching an opera, keep quiet and applaud after a song is finished. But at a rock band concert, the quiet, restrained, model audience just seemed out of place, even posing. As a mild social phobic person, I have never liked to be the center of attention in the crowd, and conspicuous behaviors such as loud talking and screaming are absolutely impossible for me in daily life. However, at this time, in the huge and deafening music of the concert, everything was perfectly covered, so that I no longer need to worry about other people's eyes for the time being.

Taking a deep breath, I shouted out under the cover of the surrounding noise: a meaningless "ah" with a long tail, bursting from the depths of my chest through my throat, blocked by the mask and absorbed most of the volume, and then immediately I was drowned in the screams that were pouring out of the audience, and I couldn't even hear it myself.
But I did scream out loud. When the voice left my throat, it seemed to take away some invisible burden, and there was a sudden lightness in my chest. The sound waves hit my eardrums, as if breaking through an invisible fence. For a time, even the usual rules and order seemed to be of little importance. In a trance, I felt as if I had changed back to a primitive person: the music awakened the sleeping cells, and in the rhythm of the rhythm, I felt the long-lost, primitive vitality again.
There is a state in psychology called "flow", which refers to the mental state in which people's attention is completely absorbed when they perform a certain behavior. For example, an artist is immersed in his creation, and he can even turn a deaf ear to the disturbance of the surrounding environment. Whenever I write about the emotional part, I will naturally enter this state: I devote my whole heart, my brain hardly needs to think, just rely on my fingers to fly freely on the keyboard, and each character will flow out naturally. on paper.
Being in a concert, I felt like I was in a state of grand flow. When I listen to music on weekdays, most of the time I use the music as the background sound, such as when commuting or dealing with simple work; in other words, music is just a part of my life. But at the concert, screaming and cheering, I echoed with the band on stage and became part of this wonderful performance. Not only me, but the entire audience felt the impact from the music, immersed in the joy of being dominated by the rhythm: at this moment, together with them, I became a part of the music.
Upon entry, each spectator received a white plastic bracelet. The function of the bracelet is similar to that of a remote control light stick, and it will change into different colors of light as the concert progresses. When the concert began, the sky was completely dark, and the night fell, shrouded in the sky over the huge stadium. In the darkness of the night, the lights of the bracelet lit up, I stood on the stand and raised my hand high, looking around at the sea of ​​fluorescent lights around me, an unprecedented sense of belonging rose in my heart. What a wonderful and precious feeling it was: among thousands of strangers I had never met, I felt an inexplicable peace of mind, like returning to a familiar place, surrounded by familiar friends.

More than half of the concert, familiar songs one after another. When the classic prelude of "Yellow" sounded, the enthusiasm of the entire stadium was detonated in an instant, and thousands of voices came together and condensed into an irresistible force. The lights on the stage turned yellow, the warm and chilly yellow of autumn leaves. Surrounded by the sea of ​​​​bracelets, I truly felt
The lyric "look at the stars, look how they shine for you" is touching: countless bracelets are endless, close up like stars, far away like the Milky Way, and I can't tell whether it is the sky or the world in front of me.
There was a rare blood moon in the night sky that night. As the concert went on, the crimson full moon gradually emerged from the shadows, revealing its true face little by little. When the encore before the finale sounded, the big screen on the stage projected a close-up shadow of the moon, so bright and complete. The Chinese poems in my mind are deeply integrated with the English lyrics in my ears, and the language is no longer important at this moment, because the music is a tower of Babel.
At the end of the encore, the fireworks rose to the sky with the rhythm, exploding the sky above the boiling stadium. Everyone's face is reflected in the light, red, blue, purple and yellow. If music has color, it must be the brilliance on everyone's face in the stadium at this moment. Looking around the crowd, I felt a trace of nostalgia, a trace of reluctance. In the past two hours, we have been like a group of Cinderellas stepping on crystal slippers, rushing from all directions for the grand ball, meeting in the light and shadow. And it's all about to end, like the clock strikes midnight, and we're about to go back to our own lives, back to that plain and occasionally boring life.

Even so it doesn't matter, I think. For at least the past two hours, we've been gathered here for the same love. In our own lives, we may be migrant workers, parents, and children, but at the concert, we are just immersed in the audience at the moment, the closest strangers. The feelings that music brings to us may be different, and what we recall and associate may be different, but it does not matter, because the feelings are indistinguishable, and music will not reject anyone who is willing to listen to it.

The smoke from the fireworks gradually dissipated, and the band disappeared from the stage amid the overwhelming cheers. No matter how reluctant I was, the concert was over in the end. After the music subsided, my roommate and I looked at each other, like waking up from a dream. We saw a trance of returning to reality on each other's faces, and a little embarrassment after letting go of ourselves.

The lights came on at the end of the hall, illuminating the way for the audience to leave. I walked side by side with my roommate, walking deep and shallow with the flow of people out of the stadium. The brain that was still a little confused at first, after the cool wind at night, the heat gradually subsided, and I gradually woke up. The senses began to come back, and I realized that my mask was wet, probably soaked in breath, screaming, and saliva. His calf was also aching, thinking that when he jumped with the rhythm, his body instinctively controlled himself to avoid falling on the seat in the front row due to excessive force.

I swallowed, my vocal cords seemed to be scorched by fire, and they seemed to be strangled by a tight hemp rope. I couldn't tell the taste.

After two seconds of silence, we both laughed out loud. I guess she also remembered that at the concert just now, we screamed as much as we could, like two screaming chickens strangled by fate.

How happy the concert will be, how disastrous the car-hailing process will be after the show. Mixed in the dark crowd, we walked more than a dozen blocks, and finally were able to put down our positioning in a parking lot. When we got into the online car, the hour hand had passed twelve o'clock, and the new day started as usual.

The car slowly drove out of the parking lot, I looked into the rear-view mirror in the front row, and watched the stadium become farther and farther away under the night. There were few vehicles on the expressway late at night, and they left the stadium, and the surging crowd at the concert just now disappeared. The stage has come to an end, and the audience has to get back on their tracks. Our trajectories may not overlap again, but I still believe that each encounter has its own unique meaning: at least on this night, we accompany each other and jointly create the memory of this concert.

Before the final round of fireworks and smoke dissipated, for a while, I thought of a lot of people, including those who listened to Coldplay in the classroom with me back then, like today's friends from each side, and some who had made serious promises to accompany me The ex-boyfriend who went to the concert and ended up breaking up. Times have changed, and things have changed. On days when I'm feeling down, I'll probably cry a lot because of it. But in the aftertaste of such a concert, I feel open and bright: I know that there are many things in the world that end without a problem, and not everything can be like a concert, with the final note falling and the grand fireworks ending.
Putting on my headphones, I opened the album and started replaying the clips I just recorded at the concert. In the unclear video, I literally sang, cried, danced, and loved, living in every throbbing song and every trembling note. As the car sped through the night, the roar of the engine interlaced with the singing in the headphones, I closed my eyes and let the music gently wrap around me again. The past is in the past, the future is still in the future, and what I have to do now is to cherish the feeling of living in the present every second.