One of those rare fall days that was actually cool.
Mid-October, wind whips your hair around, clothes being pushed and pulled every which way, the sun just barely keeping you warm.
Four hours of the open air; getting closer and closer to the stage, crowding around closer to the other people that are there for the same reason. Four hours, and no matter how many times you like your lips, they're dry and cracking and you feel they'll never be soft again. Four hours and your nose is numb from the biting wind, icy when you touch it and your hands feel like they're burning when you raise them to your face.
Four hours and the lights go down.
You've managed to work your way quite into the crowd but in the few seconds that the lights have gone from dark to a dark, bloody red you've been pushed farther ahead.
A distant violin begins to play barely audible above the shrieks and cries of the drunk, the high, and the completely sober. Suddenly everything is warm, you start to sweat and the collective body temperature only rises as the violin gets louder, the lights keep up their hellish glow, the crowd gets louder, you lose your footing. You've lost contact with the one you swore you'd stay glued to and your cursing yourself for wearing the windbreaker and the beanie you've had to recover twice in the last 60 seconds.
You push back, catch your breath, and hold it because fuck knows when you'll be able to come back up for air.
The red gets deeper, the violin louder, the crowd more violent until all you can see are limbs, coming at you, pushing hard, pulling harder. All you can hear is the violin that matches so horrifically with the death of red that has taken over all you senses.
The only thing you can think of, as your hair becomes slicked to your face, is to stay alive.
You push against someone's shin with your right foot, another's knee with your left. You clutch at someone's shirt, put your cap in your mouth--you'll breathe when you get out.
The haunting tune is coming to a close, the air is getting hotter and increasingly wet and you panic because god only knows how much worse it'll get.
You turn, as fast as is possible, between the sweating, screaming bodies. No time to talk, no breath to spare. Pushing through a final human barricade, your feet once again on solid ground. You hurriedly grab your friends hand and don't let go for the rest of the set, putting your hat back on and adjusting your clothes in between "are you okay"s.
You turn to face front, the next song kicks up and your heart rate never slows for the rest of the night.
You've just had one of the most horrific, terrifying, amazing, wonderful experiences of your life.