Dear U2,

I am one of seventy thousand. And seventy thousand more in each of a hundred cities across the globe. Your circular stage, famous by now, lights up like a firecracker as you belt out the tunes. No one has given a second thought to sitting since you entered. We are drawn up like marionettes, arms in the air, tears in our eyes, screams caught like chilling drinks of overpriced beer in our throats. You ask us to clap along and we all have the same hands. You ask up to hold up our phones and the blackened stadium reflects your every desire, the rectangular present-day lighters swaying back and forth in a melody of communion. And the wind that forced us all to pull our hoods and caps tighter, that haunted us on our long trek here, that beat back the sounds of The Fray? You took away every last wisp of a cloud and made it disappear the moment you stepped out of the tunnel, like Moses parting the Red Sea. What is your message for us, your devoted followers, harrowed from years of longing absence, as you guide us here tonight?

I am one of seventy thousand. We are a family, and your voices our parents’ so-many-times-heard songs that we have every word memorized. You don’t need to tell us the titles, we can sing them with our eyes closed. You don’t even need the 360 screen that changes from your faces to images of Burmese imprisonment to listings of events happening right now in the world. We would still stand, clap, scream, our love as intense and committed as the thirty-four years of charity you have offered the world.

I am one of seventy thousand. I stand next to my husband who surprised me with these impossible tickets. I jump up and down every time you make your rounds, my voice tight and hoarse within an hour. When you play “Elevation” and “Beautiful Day” I grin from ear to ear, those happy days later in your bandlife, those happy days later in my life when I first heard them. When you play “One” we all sing, but I sing with tears streaming down my face, reliving my freshman year of college and circling my dorm room with that song on repeat till the floor, my feet, and my tears were worn down to desert-like hollows of pain. And “When the Streets Have No Name,” “With or Without You”? You carry me back to high school, lying on the floor of the living room, one ear to the hardwood, the rhythmic soul-searching beat and the words that tear away the pieces of my broken heart, the words that take them and fling them up into the air, sew them back together, and time after time after time, Joshua Tree one two and three, the words that save me from myself, from what I might have done. My husband? All he sees are the tears, the emotion, the me he never knew.

I am one of seventy thousand. But you are singing just for me. For the soul you saved with your music, for the movement it made in my heart, for the person I am today, with or without you.