I came upon the flyer by chance.
Taped to a streetlight, its hand-drawn letters wavered slightly with a kind of charming, earnest immediacy that made me pause midstep. “Evanston Skate Jam,” it read.
I snapped a picture of it, though my curiosity faded as the weight of the long day ahead settled in. But the very next day, I spotted another flyer in the middle of a park, face down in the woodchips. I picked it up, and, in that moment, I made a quiet promise to go. It felt less like a choice and more of a small, welcome inevitability.
When the evening came, I walked beneath a sky softened by pink and yellow hues, a tenderly nostalgic image that only frequents the days between summer and autumn. The trees had begun to don their seasonal palette, with their ochres and ember-tinged leaves drifting gently through my periphery. Twiggs Skatepark settled into the urban landscape like a breath held between beats — a sacred stillness where sound became motion, and motion took on meaning.
I had never stepped foot in a skatepark before. The cultural codes of the space were entirely foreign to me. Though I have never been one to slip easily into the rhythms of unfamiliar settings, I found myself in synchrony with the pulse of the music, tapping my foot to the simple tunings of a guitar and watching the skaters with a growing sense of awe.
The atmosphere was utterly captivating. The park brimmed with people of all identities — small children biking up ramps twice their height, eyes squinted in determination; teenagers adorned with denim and brooding adolescence, trading quiet sparks of mischief; parents filming from the edges of the crowd, trying gently to hold the moment still. There was something romantic about its disarray.
As each act took the makeshift stage, people gathered together and swayed in collective rhythm. The music breathed vigor, and around it all, the skaters continued skating — vaulting into the air, falling, flipping their boards and falling again. I was struck by their unwavering continuity. They fell often, sometimes hard, and I felt myself instinctively flinch on their behalf, anticipating the shame or small disintegrations of confidence I had encountered in other spaces.
But nothing of the sort arrived. No jeers, no derision. Only the soft scuffle of sneakers returning to the board, the wheels grazing the ramp again and again. Their resilience commanded attention but asked for no audience; the music, too, felt less like a performance than an invitation to be present. Failure here was not an obstacle but a gentle interlude singing a promise of continuation.
As the thought settled, a soloist stepped forward. He started with a gentle acoustic set, but soon shifted to a different beat, strapping on skates and delivering a rap while gliding in place. What may have seemed to others like a precarious balancing act looked to me like something courageous, a message propelled by a sort of audacious sincerity.
To create music is to embrace the tremor within every hitch of a breath, to steady the heartbeat that hums just beneath the notes and gently tugs at the strings. In a world that seemingly worships perfection, these raw moments of emergence are acts of revolution. That evening at Twiggs, the music wasn’t a performance I attended, but a rhythm that ignited my very being.
Cordelia Aguilar is a Weinberg sophomore and author of “Earworm.” She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
