I’ll take the fame. You keep the memories.
Fame. Infamous. Definitely famous.
Loved. Yes. Definitely loved.
The thought alone makes my chest bloom. Love spills from somewhere deep inside me — the depths of my soul, perhaps. Or maybe the very center of my heart. Or, if we’re being honest, the ventricular muscles.
It’s warm.
Golden.
Shimmery.
It wraps itself around everything.
Is that enough, though?
To be loved.
Just loved?
I don’t know.
Maybe it is.
Maybe I only think it is because being loved feels like proof.
Proof that there is something in me worth loving.
Acknowledgment, though.
Acknowledgment of my confidence.
Acknowledgment of my singing.
My art.
My music.
I want that.
To be seen. To be acknowledged.
But maybe that is what love has been all along.
To be seen. To be known. To be acknowledged. To have someone look at you and say, I see what you carry.
But am I easy to love?
Some people are.
Some people seem born to be loved.
You look at them and wonder if the world simply decided, collectively, to be gentle with them.
I’ve never seen hate beneath their names.
Or maybe I just wasn’t looking.
Maybe the love surrounding them is so immense that the hate disappears into it, like a speck of sand on a beach.
Does it count, though?
Does it count if one is full of love?
I think I am.
Mine just isn’t always graceful.
Sometimes it overthinks.
Sometimes it cries.
Sometimes it stays awake replaying conversations that everyone else has already forgotten.
But love…
Lots of love I do have.
Does that count for something? Does carrying so much love make me easier to be loved?
I want to be loved.
Not just by one person. Not just by a room.
By many.
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And fame offers that.
The illusion of being loved by many.
Sometimes…
The reality of it.
But fame…
It always asks for something in return.
It asks for your skin.
For your mistakes.
The mob waits. Ready to tear you apart.
Hidden eyes between the riffs. Passing comments.
Everyone hands you a different mask to wear, hoping it fits the story they’ve already written about you.
Some get to know you. The real you.
Some never meet you. The real you.
One day they love you.
The next, hate is served buffet-style. Endless and waiting. All you have to do is choose.
Choose the comment you’ll believe. Choose the one you’ll carry home. Choose the one you’ll read again tomorrow. Choose the one that kills your confidence.
That frightens me…It really does.
But fame comes with stages.
HUGE STAGES!
The kind that disappear into darkness because there are too many people to count.
I want to be on stage.
HUGE STAGES!
Not because I want people to look at me.
I want my voice to fill stadiums. I want people to sing. I want my voice to disappear beneath thousands of other voices. I want lyrics I wrote alone in my room to find a home in someone’s else life. To become someone’s comfort. I want nothing more than be on stage. Performing.
Yes…
Performing.
But not like concerts have become. The memory becomes the video, not the feeling.
The lights go down. The artist walks on. The phones rise. An ocean of glowing screens where faces used to be.
I don’t want screens.
I want intimacy.
Musical intimacy.
The kind that makes twenty thousand people breathe together without realizing it. The kind that reminds us that, beneath all our differences, we still know the same melodies.
I want eyes that well up during the bridge. Smiles that arrive before the chorus. Hands reaching for strangers because the song made them forget they were strangers. I want people to leave remembering how they felt, not what they recorded.
I want them to remember who they stood beside when twenty thousand voices became one. The stranger they sang the chorus with. The friend who dragged them to the concert. The person they fell in love with somewhere between the first note and the last. The night they forgot, if only for a little while, that the world could be so heavy.
I want my music to become part of someone’s memories — not because they remember me, but because they remember themselves in that moment. Or maybe, I want my music to become the background of someone’s most important memories.
And maybe that’s it.
No.
That’s exactly what it is.
It is not about fame.
It is not about me.
It is about music.
It has always been about music.
The one thing capable of turning thousands of strangers into one voice.
The only thing that connects us all.
Even if only for three minutes.
