Lilly

Saturday, 8 PM: My excuses are polite and my elbows are sharp and that’s what gets me to the very front of the crowd, just underneath the stage, mixed in with everyone who’s been camped out for hours. “Lilly, there’s room over here,” one of my friends yells as I approach them, and I squeeze into their space feeling a little guilty about my height. It’s all worth it, though, when I offer the much shorter girl behind me my place in the second row, and her eyes go wide and she says “Really?!” and then, “Thank you!” I can see over her head, anyway, but I feel the warmth of the crowd beneath my ribcage now. I belong.

And I’m just in time, because only minutes after I find my place, the lights go blazing and the crowd goes wild.

We are stranger than Earth,” sings Megan James of Purity Ring, “With her seasons misled / Stronger than her moods…”

She wears mirrored gloves that reflect the light show at all angles, turning her image on my camera to a fuzzy outline in neon colors. When her hands are wrapped around the microphone she is just a silhouette backlit by a spectral glow.

“Again, again, again, I wasn’t thinking about you,” the crowd chants for her, and she is so close that I feel like I could reach out and touch her.

“Look, everyone!” she calls out during an instrumental, pointing over our shoulders. “Look at the moon!”

The moon is very close to full—the long-awaited “supermoon” is the following day—and even behind a screen of cloud it’s bright enough to cast a pale glow on her face as the song ends and darkness falls across the stage. We do not turn to look at the moon. We have eyes only for her.

“You be the moon / I’ll be the Earth / And when we burst / Start over oh, darling / Begin again, begin again.” ♦