MCR meme

[mary]

Day 6: A concert you went to. (If you’ve never been, just put a concert you wish you went to)

I have a very busy day today, so I'm totally totally cheating on this one and copy/pasting part of Sharpest behind the cut.

I went inside and upstairs and managed to get a seat near the front of the sweeping, high balcony. The venue was beautiful, like all the venues had been, faded splendor and chandeliers and a high dome of golden segments like an old, decrepit church above us. I couldn't believe that it was the end of it all, the last show, the final hours before my grand adventure was over, before all the sparkle went out of the world.

Of course, all the sparkle didn't go out of the world. Life kept going up and down and high and low, because that's what living is. In the weeks and months to come I'd go back to work and sit at my desk and write articles about the not-for-profit sector in Australia. I'd interview Brandon from New Tomorrow, and Gerard would write more comics and I'd interview him again, and Audrey and I would have a comic of our own published, and Renne would get better and continue her adventures, and Claire would fly over and join her, and back in Melbourne I'd catch the train to their houses after work each day to feed their cats for them, and I'd finish writing my story Long Live The Black Parade, which had America and loss and love painted through every word and which lives at http://longlivetheblackparade.net now, and Renne would be in the line for a rollercoaster on the east coast and a voice would say 'I know you!' and she'd turn and it would be Fred Mascherino, completing the comedy of chance meetings an entire continent away from where I met him in LA.

And one Saturday morning I'd be out for breakfast at a cafe near my flat while it was Friday night in America and My Chemical Romance were playing their last show of the tour, perhaps their last show ever, at Madison Square Garden in New York, and Renne and Claire were in the crowd and called me as the band played 'Headfirst for Halos', and I answered my phone but the call didn't go through properly, and I stood on a sunlit sidewalk near the ocean and listened to empty air and knew that on the other side of the world My Chemical Romance was playing and the audience felt alive.

But I didn't know any of that was to come, not as I sat there in Detroit and waited for the lights to go down, wishing that they never would and the last show never had to begin, because if it began it would mean it had to end. Because that's the price we pay for living: some day, we have to die.

And then the concert began, and the final spell cast itself over me. My sadness didn't go away, but it transformed, like the moment when things fall into place and a puzzle becomes a picture. I was still sad, but the sadness was a joyful feeling, and I did something I hadn't done at a single one of the shows before: I felt my eyes prickle and well with tears, even as I smiled and cheered and raised my arms above my head.

"You guys up there are as crazy as the guys down here!" Gerard told the residents of the balcony, and it was true.

There are so many moments I remember from that show. I'd left shards of myself in a dozen moments, all over the country, and I left another little piece of myself in that night, in an auditorium painted with faded gold.

The most important of these moments came as Gerard sang 'Give 'Em Hell, Kid', and I looked down at him as he moved across the stage, and his voice sang out the line "We are made from the sharpest things," and I suddenly realised I knew what I wanted for my America tattoo; I'd always known.

Sharpest.