52 CARTER
C ARTER
Sometimes I’ll wonder what the story is behind the people who have come to watch us play.
Have they traveled far to get there? Taking money out of their paychecks to spend a few hours at a show with us.
Traveling for hours, making arrangements for work, kids, whatever their life entails.
It’s humbling, and there’s this huge responsibility in it.
People think that we can’t see them from the stage, and usually we can’t, of course, in a giant crowd. But we can always see the faces in the rows near the stage when the light catches them for a moment.
“It was definitely a weird vibe that night. Really big energy,” Tommy says. “When you play enough shows for enough years, you can almost preternaturally sense when a show is going to be different. There’s a different kind of energy to it. And that one was definitely different.”
A lot of years had passed, and my life had carried me to someplace so far away that I barely recognized the world I’d once had in those early days on the road with her.
She told me that she believed I’d cut her out of my life like she’d never happened.
Like we had never happened. A type of numbing and avoidance she knew I was prone to.
She wasn’t wrong. I won’t lie. I had intentionally shut her out of my day-to-day thoughts, if only because, if I’m being completely honest, my life had somewhat depended on it at one point.
But on that night, when we were huddled together beneath the stage, about to climb the steps, suddenly she crossed my mind in the oddest way.
Just a flash, really, an echo of her, as I remembered the way it felt when she placed her hand in mine or kissed me just before I went on the stage.
I dismissed it, of course, as I had learned to do from years of practice, giving my attention to the performance. I was onstage a moment later.
“I used to wonder if she’d ever come to see us play over the years, though I suspected very much not.
I’d sort of imagine her out there in the crowd every once in a while, especially in those early years.
But it was just my imagination,” I told Michael.
“If she’d actually ever been there, I thought I would have felt her presence.
And I was right. Without realizing I was doing it, I think I started looking for her. ”
“We noticed the instant something was off. It was the end of the show,” Alex says. “We didn’t know what was going on at first, so we just kept playing. But then I looked over to where he’d been standing, to see if I could figure out what he’d been looking at, and that’s when I saw her.”