The bass was so fucking good, I could feel my blood boil in the veins. 

Even if I was wearing earplugs, I could hear every detail of the drums, of the guitar...

And of his voice.

I looked behind me, at the giant arena crowd that had come there just for them. And then there was me, at the edge on the stage down on one knee, allowed there because I was their official photographer.

How could I not have missed this? 

But looking back was a mistake. I should have kept my eyes on the band members on the stage and not on the crowd behind. Because he had noticed I was not focussed. 

And he took that opportunity immediately. Of course he did. 

I didn't notice until he was right in front of me, because then I could hear his actual voice, without the microphone. 

I looked up, my lips parting, either in surprise or because they were preparing me for something.

He looked as humble as ever. His old self, even if the venue had grown from a murky bar to an arena. A simple, grey T-shirt that clung to him, even more so now he was sweaty. A pair of black cargo trousers that looked very comfortable. His short, brown hair hanging over his forehead. A simple leather bracelet and nothing else in terms of jewellery. His brother, white-hot and discrete, was watching us from behind, his fingers touching the bass strings in a very suggestive manner.

Has they missed me, too? 

And then, he did the one thing that sent me over the edge.

And made me, Madara Uchiha, freelance photographer, fall irreversibly in love.

The world of blue that opened up before me was so beautiful, I was close to tears.

It works. It actually works.

As I looked through the viewfinder, I marvelled at how something so small, a water droplet on a petal, could look like an entire universe. I pushed the shutter button, held my breath not to move the camera a single atom as it stood on its tripod; I had noticed I needed a very long shutter speed to obtain enough light in the photo using this technique.

One second passed, two seconds... Then, I looked on the screen, and the photo I had captured was so beautiful, I smiled. I actually smiled. How long ago was it that I smiled? So long ago that using those muscles felt strange.

I was currently exploring something called the reversed lens technique. I had read about it but not believed in it, so I had had to try it myself. I now owned a reversing ring that you put on the outside of your objective, that allowed you to literally flip the objective around, fastening it with the outside into the camera house, and the inside of it out towards the world. And since a camera's job was to take a large picture and make it small, this reversing of the objective enabled you to make very small objects seem very large.

So when I had taken a picture of a tiny water droplet on a blue rose petal, going so close with the inside-made-outside of the objective I was afraid I would touch the droplet, and then taken the picture, it appeared like an orb, the black background behind the rose petal making it look like a picture of Neptune. 

And for the first time in two years, I felt joy over being behind the camera once more. 

I had always had a very specific picture in my head of what happened when a person burned out. In my mind, they dissociated, lost the plot entirely. That was not what happened to me. Not at all. I just woke up one day and couldn't get out of bed.

My job wasn't even that hard. At least not initially. I was a freelance photographer. Newspapers hired me to cover a few articles a week. Companies hired me to take portraits of their staff. I had even been hired to take photos for a cookbook once; that had been different and challenging and fun, and I had won an award for the grungy, industrial style I used for that book, even if that was not a conscious choice but rather an effect of having done urban photography for so long. I also edited the photos and had to do the paperwork seeing I ran my own company, but I got away with working 30-hour-weeks and I didn't even live with anyone and I definitely did not have children and I spent most of my free time reading books. 

But then, I had been offered that job... A job that had blown up way out of proportion, and I am not talking workload-wise. 

It was where I met them and it was them that made my life spiral in the direction of a burnout. 

But at the point in which my story starts, I didn't know about him. 

My story... It's not an extraordinary one. I honestly think you could write a book about basically anyone on the planet and make it interesting. But it's extraordinary for me, and maybe, that's enough. At its start, I'm content with my job, and I like myself and I like my life. 

At its end, I'm a different person entirely.