On fanaticism, girlhood, moving beyond, and the endless search for
emptiness, prompted by my life's collision with Nicholas Hoult's.
At seventeen, I was invincible and stupid.
I was a year out of high school and, having finally left behind the suffocating (and very limited) confines of my Catholic secondary education, I was eager to discover what else was out there for myself. I was reading over ten books a month. I was writing poetry almost compulsively. I was exploring my city and getting mugged and learning to love both train rides and walks home. I was starting to become preoccupied with planning and putting together a webzine with a small team composed of my friends, which in a couple of months would become Elision, its name picked out of a list of obscure music terms, referring to the occurrence in which a note begins where another note ends.
I hadn’t fucked up my life yet, but I would.
I wasn’t dating or rounding up the requisite vices of a reckless youth—not for a lack of trying, mind you. That kind of thing just didn’t come naturally to me, I guess. It still doesn’t. Instead, like a true-blue loser, I busied myself with a slew of come-and-go fixations, live music, bands, and the internet. My days turned into a series of hotel lobbies, fiction and indiscretion, and close encounters, too close, with false heroes who no longer matter to me as much, if at all. Years have passed since I deleted their music.
This part of my life is very well documented. I feel like it’d be redundant at this point to recount it all here, and, if I’m being honest, downright embarrassing, although I know it sort of makes no sense without context to the people who have no idea what I’m talking about. But I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t miss it. I miss my friends most of all. “Look at our lives,” we’d say in jest, echoing some cyber-phrase we had learned off of Tumblr back when it was socially acceptable to be on it. “Look at our choices.”
And I do look at them now, and I think, Well, shit. All those horrible decisions. All that wasted time.
But what’s a past self if not the most ideal recipient of a swift kick in the face?
The friends I made on the internet because they liked the same bands that I did, we’ve come to look back on these days as though we were buddies who’d been through war. We were, for lack of a better word, part of a scene. It felt at the time like it would never end, but a subculture—especially one rooted in music—was always going to be ephemeral, a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing. Eventually, of course, we were pulled apart by differing interests, college, and whatever else. For me, I suppose, it was Elision and having outgrown the very musicians I once cried over and claimed I would love for the rest of my life. Somehow, we turned into our very own “Where are they now?”
We began to think of ourselves as “veterans” of a dying movement. We’d seen it all and done it all. We were growing up and we were ready to move on.
*
When I think of the year I turned seventeen, I look at it in terms of markers—what I was listening to, what I was obsessed with, what I loved. One of these things was Nicholas Hoult.
I first became truly conscious of who he was two years earlier when I found him in an issue of Teen Vogue. I remember finding it endearing that he’d had no idea who Tom Ford even was, aside from his cameo in Zoolander, before filming A Single Man. The article mentioned that he’s 6’3”, and in the accompanying photo, his pale blue jacket and the sky around him brought out the color of his eyes.
That was the year I really started paying attention to Skins, already a couple of years too late. I had been too young and a little too un-hip to have been able to fully appreciate it at the time of its original release. His turn as Tony Stonem, the Sartre-reading, choir-singing, ambiguously bisexual (and equally ambiguously sociopathic) antihero with a heart of gold, gave me all kinds of epiphanies.
He became Hank McCoy, he read a Nick Hornby audiobook and did funny voices, and he played a zombie in love. In real life, he was shy, sweet, and self-deprecating. He was the ultimate: this impossible dreamboat, this great ideal, on whom I projected my hopeless teenybopper admiration. He would never be within my reach.
Magazines I’d read had called his type “cotton candy.” You could fall in love with him, and you could move on with your life.
So when it was announced that Nick was coming to Manila for AsiaPOP Comicon, I was, as the kids say, shook.
I found myself weeks later in a hotel lobby, alone and uncertain. Call it a Fangirl’s Lament: How do I unlearn the obsessive tendencies that anchor me to overemotion? How do you like something casually without needing to experience more? The days leading up to the Con and Nick’s arrival had come and gone, leaving me an unruly, unraveling bundle of nerves. This combination of excitement and unease manifested physically—I could feel it at the tips of my fingers, and dead center in my chest. The weirdness of it all settled over me and clung to my skin.
Like I said, I was “retired.” I’d left that life behind a long time ago. My old crew was gone; when I asked my friends to come with me for old times’ sake, none of them were free. Four years ago, I didn’t even have to ask. I was too old for this shit, I no longer belonged. Well-adjusted, stable adults did not go to hotels to orchestrate meet-cutes with the boys of their girlhood dreams. I knew this, and yet at that moment I had become very convinced that I must take a photo of Nick on film. To do that, I needed to rely on old habits and attempt to make it happen.
But the whole time I was there all I did was ask myself, “What am I doing here?”
My exploits as a teen superfan had never been so existential.
I walked out of there at half past noon with nothing to show for it. I wasn’t disappointed—I was relieved. My body lagged with the after-effects of an unwarranted adrenaline rush that went to waste. I could live with it, but the blue-moon aspect of the situation, almost farcical in its far-fetched reality, followed me around. This was never going to happen again, and I’d be foolish to let it pass me by.
I needed closure.
Before I knew it, I was standing second in line for a photo session with Nick, having spent over two thousand bucks for the assurance and the opportunity. All around me were people in costume. Talk about surreal: I was psyching myself up, telling myself that I was really doing this, in the presence of an inflatable velociraptor and the Winter Soldier and a Power Ranger and Prince Gumball and Jubilation Lee and BoJack Horseman. Cons are something else.
What took place after has been playing and replaying on a loop in the back of my mind since that day, always happening, happening, happening in its own little Groundhog Day universe, so I’m going to write the next part in the present tense.
The photo session starts fifteen minutes early. My first real glimpse of Nicholas Hoult arrives in the form of a silhouette, seen through the sheer black curtain of the makeshift booth. The ushers set the curtain aside to prepare for the oncoming chaos, and there he is. His eyes are blue even from where I’m standing, several feet away. I let out a “Holy shit” without realizing, and the chatty usherette guiding me goes, “Same!” and high-fives me.
When it’s my turn, Nick gets into a faux fighting stance and motions me over, all silliness and charm. The first thing he does when I get to his side is literally pull me into a hug, romance novel clinch cover-style. (It’s at this point that my sanity and composure go out the window.) Note that I’m not allowed to touch him unless he touches me. His shirt feels very soft under my fingers—that much I will remember clearly. He untangles himself from me and says, “Hello, how are you?”
And I swear I can’t answer for five seconds.
I’m so far gone that the automatic “I’m doing well, how are you?” failed to initiate in my faulty system. “This is so surreal for me, I’m sorry,” I tell him when I remember how to speak. “I’ve loved you since Skins.” I rehearsed this moment probably a hundred times from the second I was made aware that it could happen. And here I am, fucking it up spectacularly. Still, he tilts his head, body language for I’m flattered, and says, “Aw, thank you so much.” From the delivery, I get the feeling that he means it, even though he’s probably used to it.
I start to tell him that I loved his Happy, Sad, Confused podcast episode, to let him know I’m not messing around, but he cuts in and asks me what my name is.
You have to understand. I decided early on not to bother saying my name unprompted, because it wouldn’t matter, anyway. No celebrity I’ve ever met, save for William Beckett, has ever asked me for my name, not even when signing autographs. And now Nicholas Hoult is looking at me, waiting to know what I’m called. It feels so, so nice.
“Fiel,” I croak.
“Fiel,” he says back.
We take the photo. Then another. The flash is disorienting. I thank him profusely. I have zero presence of mind. I think I mutter, “See you around.” Which is absolutely ridiculous. I’m never seeing him again.
It’s over before I know it, of course.
It will never be over, of course.
The realizations and regrets hit me as soon as I walk out of the booth and claim my glossy picture. They come to me, at first in singular bursts, then all at once. Not enough eye contact—I’m the worst at it. I never got to ask him about his favorite book, or his favorite Salinger. I might have walked away too soon. The light glinted off my glasses unflatteringly in the photo, and I can’t ever re-do it or fix it. I was already forgetting details: what it was like to look into his eyes up close, the sound of his accent, how it felt to have his head resting in the crook of my neck.
I was alone. I didn’t have this to look forward to anymore. I didn’t have any war buddies that knew exactly what I was feeling. I was empty, all too suddenly.
I took the bus home and didn’t dare attempt to make any sense of it.
*
When I got home from my first day on my first real job, I cried at the dinner table.
“Why are you crying?” my mom asked, more out of amusement than anything. I had no answer, and to this day I still don’t. I think it had to do with the idea, plain as day, that my life was changing, and I couldn’t hold on to the comfortable constants I’d grown attached to. I couldn’t hide behind ignorance anymore. I was just overwhelmed and exhausted. But it also had to do with the fact that something huge and something wonderful had just happened, and now I didn’t know what to do with myself. All the overthinking and mixed feelings were getting to me.
Whatever it was, I’m almost certain it was the same reasoning that prompted me to cry, once again at the dinner table, when I got home from meeting Nicholas Hoult.
Sometimes I almost wish it never happened, that APCC never brought him here in the first place. If you had asked seventeen-year-old me to list things more likely to happen to twenty-one-year-old me than being within zero inches of Nick Hoult, she would have said things like going to the moon or winning the lottery, and she would have been convinced that she wasn’t lying. It was too real, too much, and it left me drained.
It gets me thinking, now that I’m older, would it always be this way? What if I’m just setting myself up for disappointment every time? Every good thing is probably just escapism in disguise: thirty seconds of brilliance followed by a lifetime of disillusionment.
Then I snap out of it and tell myself: You’ve conversed with Nicholas Hoult! Nicholas Hoult knows your name! Then I snap out of that and tell myself: There’s an entire universe out there.
I think it’s easy to read this piece and write it off as shallow and juvenile. I’m already doing it, myself. But I also think people shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the emotions experienced by anyone who’s ever loved something fanatically—it’s not being irrational, it’s being unflinchingly honest. Unrestrained. Real. And nobody should ever have to apologize for that, even if it does make us do some pretty screwed-up things.
Maybe I’ll never attain that level of “chill” that allows me to gush over my obsessions without being so emotionally vulnerable all the time. Maybe I’ll never learn to contain what I feel. Maybe next year I’ll be writing this exact same essay about someone else. Maybe I’ll never be too old for any of it, not really. And maybe I don’t really want to be.
*
Before entering the booth for the photo session with Nick, I left the voice recorder app running on my phone and snuck it into my back pocket while the ushers reiterated that we weren’t allowed to bring anything in.
I listened to it afterwards. He was so soft-spoken that his voice hardly registered. It makes me think of The Day the Dancers Came, and sometimes I imagine how I would lose the recording. I could accidentally delete it. I could lose track of where to listen so I’d understand what he was saying. I could stop caring altogether, and it wouldn’t matter what happened to it.
The audio is a mess of squealing fans, idle chatter, and white noise. The first time I heard it, I almost thought Nick wasn’t on it at all. But if I strain and really listen for his voice, I can just barely make out that nanosecond in which he spoke my name.
No matter what I do, it comes and goes fast, and for a second I’m dazed and disappointed all over again. But for what it’s worth, I’ve come to appreciate it for what it is: a beautiful, imperfect, endless moment, now gone.
