The world’s most expensive concert is coming to an end and the audience doesn’t know what to do. Some have been packing their bags. Others have been taking photos of what they will miss. All have been waiting for the silence, the absolute stillness that follows the very last movement, for which no one feels ready. All are afraid because that silence means something: the show is over. It’s dark out. We’ve got to find the car.

Yale really has felt like a four-year-long concert. I’ve watched students on the streets and chefs in the dining halls sing Lauryn Hill and George Frideric Handel. Walking to my dorm at night in the rain, I’ve heard violins in WLH, and while trying to fall asleep, I’ve heard from across the street the winds of the Newberry Organ. A hundred times I’ve stepped to the beat of the bells of Harkness Tower, and a hundred times I’ve witnessed spontaneous piano concertos in all the places pianos reside — classrooms, art galleries, butteries.

It’s no surprise, then, that at least twice a week, I’ve felt at Yale a familiar but fleeting sensation. It’s the same feeling I got when I first listened to Gustav Holst’s “Jupiter” in fourth grade band, and the same feeling I got when the girl from Unorthojocks sang “Billie Jean” in SSS 114. I’ve heard people call it “chills.” It’s a feeling of limitlessness. It’s a happiness so overwhelming that one might explode from it. Before college, I thought only music could induce it, but I’ve felt it at Yale the times we got dizzy from laughter, during the game nights the courtyard could hear, in that cultural criticism class we all loved. It’s the sense that life has become impossibly wonderful.

And it’s the fear that it might never get this good again. During those moments, I’ve tried to press pause, to slow time, to hold onto that feeling forever, and of course that’s never worked. Until now, that’s been alright. The promise of any long concert is that the chills will come back. Slow movements might come — that science credit, that bad election, the first semester of junior year — but then they go. The momentum rebounds. Until it can’t anymore.

The silence is coming and we all know what it means: there will be no more chills at this concert because this concert will be no more. For this reason, graduation has felt deathlike. I tried writing a “thank you for college” note to my parents and found myself thanking them for life. I’ve gone on very sad goodbye walks during which everything said could’ve come from an off-brand dirge. “And so it ends,” they muttered, “but at least it happened.” As though watching the reel that flashes before one’s dying eyes, I’ve broadcast in my mind reruns of chills past: the night we sang karaoke and played “Vienna” on the keyboard while a strange fellow in the corner kept shouting “woooo,” the time we played manhunt in the yard of that house in Weston.

That’s done now. People say “life goes on,” and I know it does, but I’m not so easily assuaged. I’ve seen what getting older looks like. I don’t want to be chronically bored, tired, in pain. I don’t want to spend my nights watching television and listening to bad theme songs. I’m a little worried that life has peaked, that I’ll never find a better way to spend Halloween than huddled with everyone in Woolsey Hall, dressed in costume, listening to the Yale Symphony Orchestra.

Nevertheless a small piece of me knows that there will be more concerts, just different ones with different chills. A friend from my poetry class just went to the United Kingdom to meet his first nephew, and an alumna pen-pal of mine just went to DC to see the wedding of her former roommate’s son. So that small piece of me has bought kitchen supplies, has acquired a jar for making kombucha, has made the next bucket list — the Derby, the caves, the county fairs.

But the other pieces of me still want to hold on, want an encore. During this past season of final exams, I overheard someone in the Silliman common room telling his friend, “Earlier, I played ‘Ode to Joy’ in my headphones, full volume, and I ran around a lecture hall in WLH.” He went on, “I stood on the desk and moved my arms like I was conducting.” All his friend asked was, “So you’ve gone crazy?” This is precisely what I don’t want to leave, all this brilliant craziness. All this beautiful noise.

After that conversation ended, and after the quiet resumed, a man came in and played the piano. For half an hour, he filled the room with a certain verve, with “Moonlight Sonata,” with chills. Then he stopped. Before his performance, the silence in the room was unnoticeable, but now that we were reminded of what life could feel like, the silence we were left with was absolutely imposing. It was near paralyzing. We stayed, and felt sad, and eventually got up and left.

The ending of the concert that is Yale will be more consequential. Life after graduation will probably feel, at least initially, quiet and inadequate and lonely. It’s bound to; our time here has set the bar for future concerts very high. We can only hope that that’s a good thing, hope that we are better off for knowing just how impossibly wonderful life can get, hope that someday we will achieve elsewhere a similar frequency of chills.

But that’s regarding the long term. What are we to do in this impending silence? I read this in the news a while ago, and I’ve very slowly realized its moral lesson: at a concert in Boston some years back, at the end of Mozart’s “Masonic Funeral Music,” when the silence fell and the audience didn’t know what to do, a nonverbal boy said aloud what none could articulate, said aloud the only thing left to say: wow.

JUSTIN CROSBY is a senior in Silliman College studying Political Science. He can be reached at justin.crosby@yale.edu.