One. Two.
One. Two.
“I always thought when I died, there wouldn’t be anything waiting for me. And I think about dying… a lot.”
Screams sound from the audience as the recording of my face fills the screen.
“If I was lucky, I’d see that parade… Maybe even the darkness that I called home too many times before.” I chuckle at myself. “Some fucking daydream, right? I know now, my drum kit will be waiting for me. I’ll greet the damned who arrive after, and when they tell me how they made it so long, we’ll all have the same answer. It was the—”
“—music that gave me the strength to carry on,” Zeb says, his face on the screen now.“It was the thing that helped life make sense. It connected me to people I had never met. A global community listening to and connecting with the same lyrics and beats. Music goes beyond language. It—”
“—helps us remember that we’re not alone,”Reed says, the crowd going wild.
I nudge him in the side, and he bounces on his toes, smirking sideways at me.
“It’s… it’s what we’ve all turned to when nothing else made sense… Those beats, the lyrics… all of it has saved too many of us. It was always there when we thought life might not be worth the pain.”
“Music has a way of transcending reality,”Mads says.
The horde loses their minds.
Two of our backstage crew—Drew and Porter—approach us carrying Mads’ and Zeb’s instruments.
“When the real world got to be too much, it anchored me. It brought me a future I never thought I’d have. It’s surreal that we get to create the thing we all once bled to. It’s always been my safe place, my prayer. Music—”
Each of our faces flash across the screen.
“Music—”
“Music—”
“Music—”
“—granted me the serenity to fight for my next breath,”Mads says.
“—gave me the courage to accept all the bullshit from my past,”I add.
“—encouraged me to change the things they said we couldn’t,”Zeb says.
“—gave me a voice to challenge the difference,”Reed says.
I glance down at my wrist, at the number two hundred and sixty now tattooed onto my flesh, and I run my thumb over the black ink.
“I fucking love you guys,” I say, grinning through my tears.
“We love you, Bed—”
“Love you—”
“You’re going to kill it—”
I can still hear them as I head up the steps to my platform.
“Almost every person in this room was once flatlining,”Mads goes on.“This is what we reached out to when we didn’t have anything else. This is what fought for us when nothing else did. We all gave in to the madness—”
“—the havoc.”
“—the bedlam.”
