The confirmation arrived, and a girl I had not seen for years appeared in my kitchen.
She was wearing lip gloss that her hair kept getting stuck in. She did not appear to consider this a design problem.
“Backstreet Boys,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Actual tickets?”
I turned the screen towards her.
She read it, looked at me, and read it again.
“What took you so long?”
I had never been to a concert.
It sounds like the beginning of an explanation, but I don’t have one neat enough to put after it. Somehow, the years had filled up with other things, and this had remained something other people did.
I knew the songs. I had sung them in rooms that seemed too small for the feelings involved. I had watched performances on screens and imagined the noise beyond the edge of the picture.
But I had never been inside that noise.
Now there were two tickets, and an evening in February that we were actually going to.
I read the confirmation again.
My husband asked whether I was pleased.
“I’ve never done this before.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean any concert.”
He smiled.
I had apparently told him this already. I was still catching up with it myself.
The girl had taken the good chair.
“What are we wearing?” she asked.
“I haven’t thought about it.”
She looked down at my slippers, then back at me.
“Well. There’s time.”
I wanted to ask her practical questions. What did people do while they waited? Would I feel ridiculous singing? How did everybody seem to know when to stand up?
Then I remembered that she had never been either.
She pulled her chair closer to the screen.
“Do you think we’ll know all the words?”
“I know all the words.”
She gave me a look.
“Then why are you asking about standing up?”
That evening, I put the music on.
The first few notes arrived with a room I had almost forgotten. A mirror. A bed. The private conviction that if I could sing with enough feeling, somebody somewhere would understand a great deal about me.
The girl got up before I did.
She knew precisely where the next bit belonged. So did I.
My husband came into the kitchen and stopped in the doorway.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
I was holding a tea towel. It had become a microphone through a process I was not prepared to discuss.
He leaned against the doorframe.
I missed a word, filled the gap with a sound that was mostly confidence, and kept the tea towel raised.
The girl was singing beside me, hair stuck to her mouth again, entirely untroubled by how this looked.
I carried on.
There will be things to arrange before February. A journey, an evening around it, all the ordinary details that let something lovely actually happen.
I’ve started a little note for those. They can live there instead of taking over every time I think about the tickets.
What I keep imagining is the moment before the music starts.
The girl would like February to hurry up.
From the kitchen, my husband asks whether I want the music left on.
“Yes,” I call.
“A bit louder.”