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Is it too late to believe in grace?
“Am I opening the door, Isaiah?” Skye is asking me, his eyes a perfect storm of worry.
I look up.
It is too late. We’re here. The stadium sparkles above my head, the sound of Lou’s back-up singers filtering through the car’s windows. Fans, my fans and hers, roar like a tidal wave in the distance.
“Open up, man,” Miki is practically shaking with nerves. He hates being late. “Are you kidding me?”
“He decides what I do,” Skye says, his eyes still on me.
“Open the door,” I tell him.
I step down. The air is thick with concert smoke. The fans’ cries are deafening even from here. I can’t imagine how much louder they’ll be once I come on stage if they are screaming like that for Lou. This is a sold-out stadium concert after all. And I’m about to go on that stage. My legs are shaking slightly, and there’s a lump in my throat. But I’m out of time. I take a deep breath.
It’s show time.
…
I appear onstage already singingThis Is War.
If I don’t open with a Greece-inspired song in Athens, where will I do it?
The fans are already singing every single word with me even before the spotlight lands on my face and the smoke parts to reveal me on my knees, guitar cradled between my arms, my chin to the sky, throat veins corded as I belt out the words.
And they are screaming the words with me.
Every. Single. Word.
When the song is done, I jump to my feet, feeding off their energy. It’s like they make me come alive, and they don’t even know it.
Everyone lifts their phones at the same time as I jump in the air and land on my feet to do my guitar solo.
And then there’s only the music.
Everything else stops.
That’s why I fell in love with performing in the first place. Nothing else exists in that moment but the music. Everything disappears. The people moving their hands in the air with the rhythm of the melody. The bass thrumming deep down my chest all the way to my boots. The smoke that dances with the roaming beams of light, landing for a split second on the fan’s faces, then obscuring them in darkness again. It all goes away and it’s just me and the music. It’s like I travel outside of my body and become one with the movement, the music, the lyrics. One with the small earthquake the crowd’s rhythmic dancing creates in every single show. The media has dubbed it an ‘issyquake’.
All the pain stops.
People used to say that I sang with complete abandon, as if my life depended on it. That’s why I became so popular so quickly. That, and my crazy vocal range. But I know the truth: This abandon all the critics and fans speak of: it’s not fake. It’s not something I do on purpose. It’s real. When I get up on that stage, I leave myself behind. All the broken pieces that used to make up Isaiah Pan are left on a pile on the backstage floor. And the moment I step on that platform, I’m just soul. I have no body, no memories, nothing.
I am nothing but a voice and the soul behind it.
But tonight? Tonight, I am a pierced soul. Eden has reached her slender little fingers inside my heart and plunged a knife there. Tonight, I sing as I usually do, and the crowd adores me as it usually does. But they don’t notice the difference: My soul isn’t here.
There’s nothing singing in front of them but a pair of lips still swollen from kissing her. Still hoarse from calling her name in my sleep.
“What’s up, Greece!” I yell into my mic, and my voice sounds happier and more vivid than it has in weeks. I’m Issy Woo, not Isaiah Pan. But for the first time, there’s a hint of Isaiah in there somewhere. I like it. “Are you with me?”
I drag the ‘meeeee’ until they scream their heads off.
More phones go up as one, as they frenziedly record the first words I speak to them. They don’t know what’s coming. I am going to talk a lot more. A lot.
And they are going to want to go live for every single word of it.
I have double the security tonight. Police forces are here as well. The thing is, we are expecting a riot.
