As I walked into a room of three-hundred-fifty people I had never met, I realized how alone I was. I knew nothing about the girl in front of me with frizzy hair and treble clef earrings, or about the boy next to me who sat readily with his pencil. It was then that I thought to myself there was no way all of us in this room would be able to come together and create nine pieces of music successfully. While our enthusiastic, yet strict, conductor defiantly opposed this idea, my doubt did not lessen. There just seemed to be no way.

We took out our first piece of music, and while the sound that filled the room wasn’t the worst I had ever heard, it certainly wasn’t the best. I was afraid I was right in my doubt, and I grimaced from the idea of spending eighteen hours in the same rehearsal, singing the same pieces of music, sitting in the same poorly padded chair, for the next three days, without any successful progression. As the next rehearsals were spent discussing tri-tones, hemiolas, and various other musical terms I didn’t understand, I grew sick of singing the same nine harmonies. Yet, we were all getting closer to forming successful pieces, ones with flowing melodies and beautiful words.

As I stood with my eyes on the conductor, mirroring everyone else in the room, I was no longer Rachel from New York. Something had happened, and I was one part of a whole. We inhaled and exhaled as one, connected as if one lung, instead of a collection of separate alveoli. The air went down our universal windpipe as the song concluded, and I basked in the warmth of that moment. As my heart swelled in my chest to where I thought for certain it would burst, I tried my hardest to contain my smile from reaching my ears. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to grasp the moment, intertwine it in my fingers, and stick it in my pocket where no one could take it.

When the stillness in the room was broken, it was weird to look around me. The only thing I knew about the people next to me were their voice parts, but I still felt like I knew a lot more. We all shared the same passion for music, and shared that privilege of pure beauty and excellence together. In that moment, truly nothing mattered except for the music. It’s a different kind of feeling to be part of an event, where everyone experiences the same exact emotion, feeling and understanding. I knew I wasn’t the only one who thought that brief moment was the most beautiful one I had experienced for a while. I knew I wasn’t the only one who concentrated on the reverberating sounds, wishing they would never stop echoing off the walls, for it would mean that the moment truly had to end.

I was wrong, I admitted to myself. The song was greater than I could have ever expected. I sat down in my chair, still lacking a comfortable seat, and put my music in the folder. I knew I still had at least five hours of rehearsal ahead of me, but that was okay, because I realized everyone in that room was now part of a whole. We sighed in unison, breathing through our windpipe, and heaved our tired shoulders as we were told to take out another sheet of music.