Chapter 42 #2
Lightsticks were everywhere – hung around necks, shoved in pockets, on display in clear, plastic bags. It was one of the many things that differentiated a K-Pop performance from any other. I had been to lots of live performances, but none were ever quite like a K-Pop concert.
The sense of unity was lovely. Whatever else anyone in this crowd was – student, doctor, waitress, journalist – in this we were all the same. Viber.
I discreetly dictated that thought into my recorder before I forgot to write it down later.
When I’d attended the Jingle Bell Ball, so long ago now I remember being amazed at how quickly an audience filled with general music lovers had immediately became a sea of K-Pop fans as soon as GVibes came on.
Here and now, we were all united under the same banner and for a time, I could imagine what it must feel like to be just another fan.
Someone who loved the group for no other reason than the general complexity of being a fan.
A person who loved the music, the dances, the message in the songs, or even the personas of the group members themselves.
And not as someone who knew each member.
Someone who had known each member, I corrected.
There had been a time, right at the beginning, when we’d first broken up, when I had believed it would have been easier to have never known them. Never have known him.
Oddly, being in this crowd solidified how much I didn’t believe that anymore.
Even after everything, I really believed that my life was better for having known him, and them, because my love for the music was still there.
Knowing the real people behind the songs added a layer of complexity I couldn’t have expected.
It was almost like having an additional sense to experience the music with, and for that, I would always be grateful.
For a time, I’d been granted an intimate view of how it all came together.
I’d seen the humans behind the legends. I’d seen the back breaking work I knew they put into each song and dance routine.
I knew Ace sometimes had to use supplemental oxygen after a strenuous performance because he’d caught once pneumonia as a child.
I knew Woojin still got so nervous before a big show that he wore an elastic band around his wrist, snapping it to take his mind off his nerves.
I knew so many of Joon–Jihoon’s habits that I could almost visualise him backstage now.
Unless… Unless the handful of years and their time in the military had changed even those small habits.
There, in a crowd of people happily chattering, I felt like an island. Part of the crowd, but irrevocably apart because my familiarity not only isolated me from their likeness, but my absence from the member’s lives also drew me further away.
Once, we’d been a world apart, now it felt like we had the whole world between us.
Thankfully, I was pulled out of my sudden melancholy by a surge in the crowd as the gates were opened, allowing admittance in multiple, orderly queues.
Being closer to the front, I was let into the area quickly enough to get to one of the concession stands, where I spent an eye watering amount of money on a single bottle of water.
My seat was in the stands, but right at the front. The barrier in front was the only thing separating me from the field, which had been laid out with chairs.
If I’d thought the atmosphere outside the stadium was excited, it was nothing compared to the electric feeling inside the arena.
The ambient sound of people talking coalesced to give a singular voice to the thousands of Vibers now streaming into the stadium, and I marvelled once more at the assembled mass of fans.
People from all over the country, not just LA, had congregated here, all for the same reason. It was humbling to see.
And there it was again.
That spark of pride I felt for the group.
I sighed. I could no more suppress the feeling than I could suppress the nervous apprehension I felt at the knowledge that in two days I would be in a room with them, no longer able to pretend I could hide in a crowd.
It was time to accept what I couldn’t change and go along with it.
With that mindset that I found my seat, and settled in for the show.
I’d never settled on how I was expecting to feel once I saw them on that stage – so much closer than expected, yet still far enough away to allow myself to enjoy the show as just another Viber.
I expected to feel a range of emotions. Pride, yes. Excitement – I had been a Viber before I’d been a friend, or girlfriend. Sadness for a world I didn’t belong to anymore.
Grief. For so many things.
I kept reminding myself that it was okay to not be okay. Peace came with a price.
The first hour of the concert was like immersion therapy.
I was really going through it, and I was grateful that the the stadium was dark enough to hide the tears that ran down my face, but honestly, who would have looked my way when the group so spectacularly held the attention of the entire stadium?
The concert was nearly at an end when Minjae announced the next song would be a bit different, because it wasn’t one from any of their group albums. The entire stadium fell silent with a hush I could almost reach out and touch.
“The next song we’re going to perform for you was written by our very own Jihoon. I know you know it.”
My heart stilled, even as it swelled inside my chest, as I heard those familiar first bars and for just a second, I was in a studio, thousands of miles away, in a world that had collided with another.
He stood on the stage alone, the other members choosing to stand away, or take that time to rest, sprawling on the stage, chests heaving as they looked up at him. The cameras all panned in to focus on him as he gently held the standing mic in his hands in the same way he’d once cradled my face.
At first, the song was the same one the world had heard as it had stormed the charts, but then-
Hold onto me, even if it’s just for tonight
Don’t let me fade
Pull me closer, like you did before
Hold on, until we can’t anymore
I raised a hand to my mouth, barely feeling the way my lips trembled as I listened to him change to the English version of the song. It was the same song he’d played for me in his studio. The song he’d posted online mere months after we’d broken up.
If I was really honest, I’d always wondered if maybe it had been for me. It was a thought I would never admit to anyone else, wouldn’t even say the words aloud – but here, just a soul in an ocean of them, I admitted that maybe, this had been mine.
From that though, came the dangerous thought: was it still mine?
I shut the hotel door behind me and strode into my room, shaking my hands as if I was trying to shake water off them. I walked in front of the bed, over to the windows, and then back again. I paused in the middle of the room, one hand on my hip, the other on my forehead.
Surely, my heart had been thumping for longer than was healthy, and I pressed a hand to my chest now, willing it to calm down.
Not everything was about me.
It had nothing to do with me. It was a great song. They were performing in LA, that’s why he sang it in English. Logical.
So why did it feel personal?
I blew out a breath and fell backwards onto the bed and willed my body to stop thrumming with anxious energy.
The rest of the concert had been an explosive celebration. An emotional outpouring between GVibes and Vibers. A reunion of fans and the members who had credited them so freely with all their success. It had been beautiful to watch, to be apart of, even if I couldn’t help but feel outside of it all.
“It won’t matter if we don’t win on Saturday,” Minjae had said during the encore, referring to the Music Choice Awards, “because we have already won. You are the greatest award we could ever win. We love you, Vibers!”
The crowd had exploded, screams and cheers that lasted for minutes, lightsticks waving through the air, little beacons of individual love, joined with the many thousands of others to create one, enormous cresting wave that never ceased – not even when the group finally left the stage, thirty minutes after they were scheduled to.
I’d smiled, imagining the silent indignation of the stagehands in the back.
In the quiet darkness of my empty hotel room, the air seemed to stir with the silent echoes of the stadium, making the stillness vibrate with the absence of sound.
It was the kind of quiet that made me desperate to fill it with something in order to drown it out.
I put the TV on, a local news channel pulling the quiet out of the room like a vacuum, and I exhaled in relief.
It didn’t last long. The noisy silence still filled my head, and after sitting with it for a while, I decided I was too damn tired to fight it.
So instead, I tried to analyse it from a new perspective, one that would allow me to turn it into a narrative, like I did with my articles – seeing an angle and creating a story from it.
Seeing GVibes tonight had been like watching an alternative version of my life play out, because, had I never met Jihoon, the direction I’d ultimately taken would have been different, but also the same.
In all likelihood, I probably would have gone along with Becka’s suggestion to reach out to similar industries and extend my visa – or whatever that process would have looked like, but then I still would have left for my mum.
The reason I’d hesitated when leaving Korea hadn’t just been about leaving Jihoon, it had also been because I knew that leaving without my visa being settled meant leaving that entire life behind for an indeterminate amount of time.
It had felt like an ending – even if at the time I hadn’t been ready to call it that.
In the years since my life went so spectacularly off-course, I’ve given some consideration to the question of whether I would still be who I am now, or not.
At the time, I considered GVibes to be the catalyst to my career – seeing that dance practice and turning it into the blog that had brought me such a large audience.
The journey might have looked different, but ultimately, I think I would have ended up at the same destination.
Career aside, I knew for certain I would have been exactly where I was tonight – looking up at the stage as they performed.
The difference would have been in my uncomplicated emotional response. I would have been joyful, excited and just another Viber in the crowd.
Not the slightly broken person who couldn’t help but look at five people she almost had a life with.
Being back in LA felt like coming full circle, because in some ways, it felt like I was back at the start, and in others, it felt like a reminder of what I’d once had. And what I’d lost.
Maybe that’s why I took a bottle from the mini bar, sat at the desk, and opened my laptop, signing into my cloud storage. It was like opening a time capsule, it had been so long since I’d last looked at the contents of this folder.
Most of the photos and videos in here were tame. Just fragments of memories too ephemeral to keep on my phone – blurry, drunken selfies with Becka in clubs, random shots from around the city, screenshots of inside jokes I couldn’t even remember anymore.
But some of it was more… more.
Pictures I’d taken in Korea. Photos of Joon in the kitchen making us a pot of ramyeon, selfies taken in bed on lazy Sunday mornings.
Moments shared with only each other and hidden from the rest of the world as though it was a crime, and not an expression of a love I still felt the ache of. A wound that had healed, but badly.
So many times I’d considered going through these files, deleting them. But I never did, because deleting them felt like pretending that the memories didn’t matter.
Some of the photos and videos were more innocent, more innocuous, but ones I’d still taken down from my social media because ‘you never knew’.
Pictures taken in front of ENT, photos of me inside our apartment.
Even some group photos I’d taken of the other members, both with, and without me.
Drunken pictures of a Christmas tree, pictures of men sprawled over cushions on the floor, half eaten muffins and wrapping paper tossed carelessly aside.
Pictures of another life, when two different worlds collided.
Pictures of a life that nearly was.