Surrounded by familiar faces, the people that you love to see

 Or: I was born in the right generation

I hadn’t been inside the SM Skydome since I was 18. 

It had been about ten years. It was the venue where I got to cover my first concert with a press pass, where I got to see William Beckett from the front row in the most intimate concert I’ve ever attended—only hundreds in the crowd—and he acknowledged me from the stage. But there’s only ever going to be one band I’ll always associate with the Skydome, and it was the same reason I was there at that moment: The Maine. 

I hadn’t gone to a concert of theirs since their pivotal Pioneer Tour stop in 2012 because their newer songs resonated with me less and it got to a point where I’d become mostly unfamiliar with their setlists. But this was going to be the Sweet Sixteen Tour, to commemorate their debut album Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, and they were going to play the whole album on their second night in Manila, along with more deep cuts from their discography. 

My friends and I could not miss this. 

Having been fans of The Maine when we were in high school, we’ve naturally had plenty of time to evolve into different people and kind of grow out of that phase. We tend to joke that we’re “retired.” But as soon as the announcement dropped, it was like no time had passed. We immediately made plans, and for some of us, for the first time in a very long time, we were going to be attending another concert in a mall together—seeing the band that allowed our worlds to collide. 

There was no question to me that I would be getting two-day tickets, and closer to the show dates, I decided to treat myself and check in to the hotel connected to the mall so I wouldn’t have to go home only to come back the next day. Most of this might be personal myth at this point. I’d waited too long to write and I didn’t take many notes on my phone, and it was really just two great nights spent listening to the music of my teenage years live with the people I got to grow up with listening to them. 

It’s so freeing to have a band like The Maine that’s pure comfort. I didn’t have any expectations, save for songs I wanted to hear, because I’d already had such a rich history of experiences related to them. I’d seen them in their prime, I’d met them, I’d even gotten to interview them a number of times. Garrett had literally, at one point, used a photo I’d taken of him as his Twitter icon.

On September 27 we mostly watched from the right-side bleachers. They played over 25 songs that night, including “Diet Soda Society,” “Right Girl,” “Don’t Come Down,” “Misery,” and “Blame.” I’d been playfully livid whenever they’d play “Saving Grace” here and I hadn’t come to see them, but this time they played a beautifully romantic mashup of the song with “Whoever She Is” that had us all swaying. Camz and I kept screaming that it’s my song (being a Halloween baby) during “Forever Halloween,” a track I thought I’d never hear live. And “Another Night on Mars” was a great encore. It was funny how we’d go quiet when they’d play newer songs, then go absolutely berserk when it was time for the classics. 

But what got me crying, grasping the magnitude of the how-we-got-here-ness of the moment, was “(Un)Lost” and the back-to-back double whammy of “Love & Drugs” and “Like We Did (Windows Down).” I couldn’t help flashing back to 12 years ago, sitting on the floor outside this same venue with Mariel waiting in the queue to be let in for that concert, as the same two songs—“Like We Did” and “Don’t Give Up on ‘Us’”—looped over and over.  

September 28 was the Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop show, and we decided to plunge into the crowd for it. We all laughed seeing the band come out in the iconic white and gold suits (not black and blue!) they’d all worn as teens in the late 2000s, destined to be in the running for the new princes of pop-punk and eventually become something else altogether. “Everything I Ask For” will always get me on my feet, the ultimate girl-worship anthem where John comes off as a bit of a lovable loser. “Girls Do What They Want” and “Count ‘Em One, Two, Three” will never stop being good old call-and-response fun. “Into Your Arms” is the only song that will ever make me weirdly emotional during a line that tries to bait you into singing, She’s got the most amazing ass. 

John went into the crowd at one point. I think it may have been to start a mosh pit, or to join one. I’d said to Clarissa the day before that the concert didn’t feel complete without one of her signature condom balloons, and that night she actually delivered. 

I was so excited to sing “Love is a luxury,” she said during “This Is the End.” And the feeling of getting to scream 81! 23! Means everything! To me! during “We All Roll Along” is something indescribable that not everyone will get, but here it’s practically a love language, and few things are as powerful. 

And then there’s “We’ll All Be…” A song that goes on forever, but never long enough. My friends and I held each other tight as we declared, And for the first time, I feel less alone. For the first time, I can call this home. And later, We all have been degraded. We all have been the greatest. 

I had zero regrets about the hotel stay, even if it was a little pricey. I had a good breakfast, piling my plate with annatto rice and creamy chicken and fried dumplings and dry noodles, plus a little chocolate chip scone. And two consecutive days of concerts was a lot, but nothing I couldn’t wash away with a hot shower as soon as I got into my room. 

 

I spent most of both days with Camz, Audrie, and Steph—the three I regularly talk to the most, along with Cheska. But really the whole affair was nothing short of a family reunion: frantic waving and voices going shrill with excitement upon spotting these faces we hadn’t seen in years, some of which we never thought we’d see again. We sang along to lyrics that are probably tattooed on our minds (if not literally tattooed somewhere on our bodies), we laughed about old inside jokes and got up to old habits, we took pictures, we caught up over dinner, we sat down when we needed to because our joints did not work like they used to. “We’re so old!” 

I was especially grateful to have gotten back in touch with Kat and Clarissa, who flew out to live this great big new adventure in America not long after the tour. 

People express doubt all the time these days that you can meet friends online, particularly Tumblr, even more that you could manage to have them cross over to the real world. But as someone whose lifelong friends are from Tumblr, I’m just like, “Skill issue.” 

But of course these friendships are the absolute rarest gems from a bygone era, and I’m constantly being reminded of how lucky we are to get to have something this special. It felt extra real, looking around the Skydome and seeing them, feeling them, hearing them right next to me. These were people I met on a screen because we all loved The Maine a decade ago, and somehow they’ve become inextricable constants within my life. Nobody has ever oomfed harder than we have.

I wouldn’t even really called it a “reunion,” because we’ve all been here for each other all along, like the Skins cast. 

We’re so lucky. We’re so lucky. The timing, the people, the places. We got to be young at a time when these were the bands and these were the songs that were at their peak, living out our exhilaration, living through our angst, and living vicariously through them. Physical media and Astroplus release parties, music video premieres and waiting for surprise screen time on MTV, vinyl pre-orders and waiting two months to listen to the album until the record arrived and you could drop the needle. Microblogging when people weren’t afraid to interact and weren’t too cool to mess up their pages, so we just talked directly on our Dashboards through our posts and reblogs. 

A scene when being part of a scene meant something. You just truly had to be there. 

This kind of thing will never happen again, for us or anyone else. 

It wasn’t just our little corner of the internet—it was also a subculture and pocket of time that allowed us to meet in person frequently and really keep in touch. For a brief time concert producers actually took note that this is what teenagers were listening to, and they managed to bring these obscure-ish bands often enough. Think about it: even There for Tomorrow, even The Downtown Fiction. Many of us were also entering college, and it was just easier to make plans and keep seeing each other and hanging out.   

Live shows at Ayala Malls came to define a generation—our generation. They were common enough that they became unlikely markers of a specific era in my life, of my coming-of-age. Days when Fridays meant going to the mall after school to hang out at Timezone, or see the latest Harry Potter movie (I wish I could make a different reference, but I have to be true to the time), or try new toppings on frozen yogurt. It’s just that sometimes, you just happened to catch Cobra Starship performing their hit “Guilty Pleasure” live and in person at the activity center, and it felt like the most normal thing in the world. 

When the LIV3 Tour was announced to be kicking off for a four-day run in 2011, it caused a huge shift. We could look at how our lives had changed and pin it all on this one crazy week. Our post-concert emotions didn’t cease for six months, as the February show dates bled into high school graduation (for some of us, including me) and the summer and some of the following school year, until we had a new thing to focus on: embarrassing to admit, but it was the All Time Low concert in Araneta that would be taking place that September. And one of the acts for LIV3 was going to be The Maine, whose then-latest album Black and White had pretty much been a soundtrack of my senior year. 

It was pretty clear that while those of us in bandom listened to many acts, the center of our ecosystem and the band that tied us all together was The Maine. If LIV3 was the beginning of everything, Pioneer Tour was where all of it fell into place. Full fucking circle. 

I’m going to hand it over to 17-year-old Fiel from 2012 for a bit: 

You listen to a band for almost five years, and for the first three years you think you’re never going to see them live. You think you’re alone, all this time, listening to them, you think nobody else in your country gives a shit about them. Well, you know there’s got to be somebody else out there, but you don’t know how to find them. You think, “I’d do anything to hear this live.” You think, “Of course, it’s never gonna happen.” 

But somehow, unprecedented and unexpected, this band had ended up here, in my city, in my “hometown,” as pop-punk cliches go. 

You look around, and there are people who feel the exact same way you do, who love this band as much as you do. And you never thought this moment would ever come. 

And you’re there. You’re so lucky to be there. 

This was also around the time Tavi Gevinson launched her online magazine Rookie, which in turn inspired and launched several copycat youth-oriented zines—one of which was our very own Elision, ideated during an idle, random conversation we were having while waiting around for yet another Ayala Malls concert to begin. We were young enough to want to do everything and believe we could make it happen. On my blog I’d post stupid song lyric Picnik edits on pretentious pictures I took with my Nikon D3000, and for some reason they’d get hundreds of notes. As 13- to 16-year-olds we all had businesses selling one-inch wristbands, designing them ourselves and emailing suppliers to produce them for us… and getting detained by mall security for trying to sell them at a Good Charlotte show in Glorietta.

Yes, we literally made (most of) these

Now that I’m 30, I sometimes think about the Tumblr Ask I got when I was 16 that just said, You are so young. It was meant to be condescending, to tell me I didn’t know shit about anything. Of course, I only replied with a GIF of somebody blinking, unimpressed. But that was the best and worst part of growing up online, after all: getting to make mistakes, getting to start over, getting to put something out there and have it travel and reach an incredible amount of people, even if it’s not perfect. 

The whole world was my Tumblr Dashboard, and my Tumblr Dashboard was my whole world.

My online friends and I built our trust and memories as we kept seeing each other, hands held tight and moving our bodies in the dark to the backdrop of all the songs we loved, live. Gathered to share our voices and our elation and this experience that’s bigger than all of us. It went on for a couple of years, every few weeks or months. And it felt only apt to have the culmination of it be the 2013 Fall Out Boy show in Araneta, after they came back from their four-year hiatus. I had turned 19, and I was ready for something else. Everything else.  

I was at prime malleability when I was 16 to 18, waiting to be shaped into a person. I could become anyone. It was that age when the bands you listened to became part of your identity, and in my case, they literally wound up creating domino effects in every facet of my life, for the bad sometimes, but mostly for the good. My friends, my job, how I create and how my passion manifests, how I handle grief and depression. 

We were the ones who were always saying, “I was born in the wrong generation.” But years later, it feels pretty good to realize we couldn’t have been part of a more fitting, more right one all along.

Even if I was “over it all” by 2013 and we all started branching out to other interests, my online friends and I kept in touch, and it wasn’t just because we had our zine or we were still following each other on social media. We’d become IRLs, reaching a level of closeness that allowed us to know each other inside out and love each other—not friends from Tumblr or Twitter, but bona fide friends, period. Tied to each other for life by the blue-moon moments we’d been through, the way nothing else can and nobody else would understand. Organic, true, valid, although I know in my heart it’s always been that way. I had called it a scene, but it was much more than that. It was a community. 

I’ve written this so many times: We came to be in each other’s lives because we loved the same things, and now we love the same things because we’re in each other’s lives.

It’s funny and it warms my heart so much to think about how we used to joke about Ovation Production bringing ‘80s nostalgia acts, and now we were pretty much the ones going to nostalgia-bait concerts. But I’d be doing The Maine a disservice to call them nostalgia fodder, because even now, almost two decades into their career, they’re as experimental and relevant as ever. And even if I’ve moved on, they’ll never stop meaning a lot to me. 

The morning of September 29, I checked out and went home, my wristbands from the two previous nights already buried like confetti somewhere in my bag. It never stopped feeling a little strange, a little empty when the bands were gone and it was all over. “On the ride home I started to get sad,” I’d written in my journal the day after I attended some concert in 2014, ten years ago now. “I always do when [something great] ends and I get preemptively nostalgic.” 

In my room I dug high (the overhead cabinets) and low (the boxes under my bed) for any artifact I could find from when I loved The Maine the most, but I was an idiot and let them all go. I’d sold my signed albums, including the copy of Black and White I’d bought from their merch table at LIV3, when my mom had gotten sick, and the regret kind of stings. But at least I still have my autographs from the whole band—and one from William Beckett—from when I was doing my silly “project” where I collected musicians’ stripper names. This was the kind of crude faux edginess that was acceptable during peak bandom, okay!  

And I’ll always, always have that time after we’d taken our picture for the Pioneer Tour meet-and-greet session, when I was walking off to let the next person have their turn, and I hadn’t even taken a couple of steps when I heard: “Fiel!” 

I’ll let 17-year-old Fiel take this again (even though I can still pretty much recite it verbatim): 

“Yes?” I turned around and faced John, the one who had called me. By my flipping name. I was looking him right in the eye, not even aware of anything or anyone else.

“Fiel, right? How do you spell that?” John asked. “F…?” 

“F-I-E-L,” I said. 

“F-I-E-L,” John repeated with a smile. “Fiel. That’s pretty!”

I still scream into a pillow about it sometimes.  

I may not have had any expectations going in when it came to the Sweet Sixteen Tour, but it was cool to end up in the front row (off to the side, but still) during the second day. And, okay, let me just have this, but I don’t think I’m being delusional when I say that John had looked over and our eyes had met while I was singing along to “I Must Be Dreaming.” 

These photos are so bad but whatever

We locked eyes, and he pointed at me as if he remembered me from all those years ago. The sight line was so clear, and I don’t think it was meant for the rando in front of me. He’d done it before, too, during an event at the Mall of Asia in the latter half of 2012, and if my memory serves me correctly, maybe even at Fairview Terraces in 2015. 

And I honestly wouldn’t put it past him, because I know that’s the kind of sentimental person he is. 

It was so, so wonderful to watch him take the stage again and note that he’d grown up too, right along with us. I’d been a fan of his since he was 19, and he was 21 the first time I saw him live, 23 the last. He was 36 now, married, a father. A girl dad! It was crazy to see how his demeanor had changed. He took himself a bit too seriously in his 20s, like many of us do, weighed down, in his head. I wish I could’ve told him “I get it,” but it’s enough for me to have listened to his music and think, “He gets me.” Now here he was. More confident, more likely to tell dad jokes (so much dad jokes), a certain lightness to him. Like he’d finally seen what was on the other side, and he’d found that everything was going to be just fine. Still every bit the rock star. 

(It's been so strange as well to look back on these bands and realize that so many of them found success online right out of high school. They'd seemed like whole people already, but they weren't that much older than us, and they were also just figuring things out. These people were from small towns, 17 to 20, already living out of tour vans, already total pros, already writing music that will not just resonate but prove to stand the test of time. Again: that just doesn't happen anymore.) 

John at Pioneer Tour Manila in 2012

There was a tweet where a younger person was asking, “Can you imagine being a teenager in 2014? Was it really like this?” And someone had quoted it with something like, “It was great and you weren’t there and you’ll never experience it.” 

And they were being funny, but it made me stop and really reflect on it. The truth is, there’s something enviable about being a teen in every decade. I’ve missed out on so many things, and I’m only getting older, but it made me glad that this, all of it, this is what I got. 

Something’s gotta give now

I waited until after the One Direction concert to tell my parents I wasn’t graduating. 

By the time they announced the group’s Manila tour dates in May 2014, I was already over it. My “official” One Direction phase lasted only a month: It was January 2012, I was seventeen, and I had moved on from teen heartthrobs (the Jonas Brothers) in favor of edgier dreamboats (Andrew VanWyngarden). I was in a hurry to grow up. 

When my friends from bandom—that subculture of the internet dedicated to the glory days of 2000s pop-punk and alternative bands from labels like Fearless and Fueled by Ramen, my main focus being The Academy Is…, Cobra Starship, and The Maine—began revealing themselves as One Direction converts, I didn’t get it. I was immune to their accents and their glossy, clean-cut, just-shy-of-matching pinup-du-jour looks. But rabbit holes were rabbit holes, and one night, in an attempt to understand the Directioner Mystique, I found myself looking up their tour diaries and the quintessential fanmade “funny moments” (which were indeed funny) on YouTube. And then came the excellent songs from an admittedly solid debut album, and I couldn’t deny it. I was hooked.

For the next four weeks or so, at least. It was enough to get me to spend another P360 (not a small value for someone on a UP student’s allowance) on the latest issue of BOP magazine, something I hadn’t done since I was thirteen, just so I could get the fold-out mega poster and put it up on the wall by my bedside. It was enough for me to tune in to the premiere of the “One Thing” music video and look back on it as some defining point of a year in which I turned eighteen and so many significant, unforgettable things happened. I took a screenshot of a close-up featuring Zayn and Louis and set it as my laptop wallpaper. But by February, I’d become preoccupied with a series of Ayala Mall shows headlined by The Summer Set and A Rocket to the Moon, and it just so happened that my crush on John Gomez at the time was enough to stomp out any remaining embers of what I felt for One Direction. 

So when we found out about On the Road Again Tour in Manila that night in May, I was far enough removed from everything One Direction that I didn’t panic about needing to see them—but I was also still attached in a way that was more about nostalgia and knowing what a huge cultural event it was than anything, and I knew I didn’t want to miss being there in some way. 

An actual photo of Manila Bay from that night in 2014. 

The shows were going to be held a whole ten months later in March 2015, on the Mall of Asia concert grounds. Having attended Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream concert there, I knew two things: one, I didn’t have the means or will to spend on anything besides general admission, and two, general admission gives you shit visibility of the stage because you’re basically on a flat parking lot surrounded by massive heads. It was pretty much a no-brainer to make the decision to stay outside and not buy tickets, since it was an open field and we’d basically get the same experience. The important thing was getting to hear these songs live, because they did have their part in becoming a soundtrack to my teenage years. 

The day before tickets were made available, people started camping out at the Mall of Asia Arena for fear of losing out on the sections they wanted. My best friend at the time, Camille, was one of them. I was nineteen and in the middle of the longest summer of my life, a blue-moon kind never to be replicated again that lasted a total of four months because my university had decided to shift the beginning of its academic calendar from June to August. I was at a crossroads and anxiety-ridden about my future and the fact that I was delayed at school. 

An endless night in the city was just what I needed. 

I don’t even remember what I told my parents regarding where I was going and where I would be sleeping. They certainly would’ve never allowed me out if they’d known the truth. Somehow I ended up going on this overnight excursion, living out my YA novel dreams like I’d read about in Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist or Graffiti Moon. Accompanying my friends as they chased after their dreams of seeing One Direction from the front row was just an excuse. 

We inhabited the coffee shop by the boardwalk until it closed, after which we sat facing Manila Bay in the open air while the skies and the city got darker around us and the clocks eked past 3 a.m. Soon our friends had to go and secure their spots in the line to get tickets, and Rian and I were left with the sounds and smells of the sea and this colossal, magnificent, deserted mall to call home for the night. 

We were nowhere and everywhere, exploring where we could and talking trash and the things we loved, every little thing that connected us and made us whole, together. I can remember none of it now, but I know it mattered deeply and it made sense in the moment. And through it all the mall stood empty: apocalyptic, creepy, grand, surreal. Almost a decade later and I can still feel the way my heart jumped when we spotted a silhouette inside an Icebergs, and the relief and hilarity of discovering it was nothing but a cardboard cutout. I can imagine us sitting on a bench outside a vacant, lifeless SMX Convention Center, nothing but specks in the midst of such a looming structure, laughing loudly and freely against the quiet at juvenile prank ideas and feeling like we owned the world.

Memes and existentialism and the latest episode of SNL (Andy Samberg and St. Vincent, now a classic) on a first-generation iPad Mini at a McDonald’s, Jem and the Holograms and “Dancing Anymore” by Is Tropical and “California Daze” and “Sugarstone” by Peace in the early hours at a 7-Eleven as the sun finally rose over the commercial buildings and concrete. 

We sang bits and pieces of The Strokes’ “Razorblade” through the night: 

I don’t wanna know!

I don’t wanna know—

Tell me tell me tell me tell me

No, don’t,

Okay

By the end of it, we had been awake thirty-two hours. I went home with the strangest sense of jet lag, and knew even then that I’d come away from it a different person, as easy as recognizing the changes that came with a new day. For months after I would see how much had shifted in my life and be able to pin it all on this one night.

Months passed. It seemed impossible that May that they would, it seemed so far away, but they did.

The day before the concerts, it was announced that Zayn would be taking time off from the tour to recuperate, which meant that he would not be appearing in Manila with the rest of the group. My month-long stint as a Directioner aside, I’d come to identify myself as a “Zayn girl,” and I was mildly devastated that three years of waiting had led to this. Still, his health was more important, and it was going to be another fun, endless night with friends nonetheless. 

Camille’s VIP ticket was for the second day, so a group of us were going to spend the first day at the barricades, listening outside the venue. We got there with minutes to spare, securing a good spot away from everyone else who had the same idea we did. When “Clouds” started up, there was screaming all around me. I tried to feign being too cool to react at first, but quickly dropped it because it didn’t matter and this was bigger than me. And because I was so happy, I couldn’t believe it was happening. Nobody saw it, but I was grinning from ear to ear.

It started raining during “One Thing.” I flashed back briefly to when I first saw the video and couldn’t help the emotions that rushed through me—it seemed so long ago. We only sang louder and didn’t even attempt to run for cover. Fireworks exploded with color across the skies as the show drew to a close, and I took shitty videos on my low-fi toy camera that would remind me of Ang Nawawala. 

That Monday, I would try to take a short afternoon nap and wake up in the dark. I would miss everyone. The group would be gone, already jetted off to another city two thousand miles away. I would miss them and I would miss the sea. I would think back to hearing “Girl Almighty” live (for free!) and how euphoric and religious it felt, and I wouldn’t mind that this was what I had to remember, because it was so nice the way only the simplest things could be and I was learning to take what I could get and make it mean something. 

Next time, I would think, I’m getting a ticket. 

But as we all know by now, there wouldn’t be a next time. Less than a week after he announced his break from the tour, Zayn left the group altogether, for good this time, and the rest of the members would go on “indefinite hiatus” by the end of the year. And this is going to sound dramatic, but it led me to question everything I thought I knew. 

Even as my interest dwindled over the years, it became undeniable that One Direction had earned their place as icons for the 2010s. At the time I was unsure of many things regarding what’s to come for me, but I found comfort in the fact that I could be sure of them. I was convinced they weren’t going anywhere, and then they were just gone.

For the first time, I felt like I was getting old. My generation was beginning to date itself, little by little, and our cultural icons and markers were disappearing and becoming obsolete. This boy band was my little piece of fluffy escapism. It was easy to take them for granted; I could be interested in them without being invested. I’d counted on them to remain the same for a little while longer, but deep down I always knew they were meant to fade from those teenybopper magazine covers eventually—that was just the way things were.  

Still, I was twenty years old, and they were the biggest thing on earth. It was never easy to face the end of something you’d grown used to. If they couldn’t last, then did anything else have a chance?

I’ve come to think of these nights, ten months apart, as parallel to one another—two halves that come together to create my own great rock ‘n’ roll friendship movie. Think Detroit Rock City, Wayne’s World, Almost Famous, and, yes, Nick & Norah. One Direction, as it turned out, ended up being beside the point. Despite the hyperbolic gut reactions I’d written about, after seven years I’ve come to find that any feelings or thoughts I ever had for or about them have basically ceased to exist. 

(Except for the generational grudge I hold against Zayn for doing what he had to do just before the Manila stop of the tour, and the never ending rollercoaster of declaring I’m over him until he goes and does something hot like dressing up as Daredevil for Halloween or consistently taking a stand against Israel, after which I’m in love with him all over again. That’s never going away.) 

Looking back on it now, these two infinite nights ironically became the end of several things, even if some of them took longer to fizzle out than others. In the first essay I ever published, which was about Zayn’s departure, I wondered what else I might lose in time, and it wasn’t easy to go through the gradual process of finding out it would be the very friendships that made these adventures so special in the first place. Some of them I can freely admit to being partly my fault, while others are a bit more difficult to explain. 

I could never have survived that summer in 2014 or that precarious period of my life in 2015 without them, and it’s bittersweet to recall what we’ve been through now that we’re no longer in touch. Just another thing that I believed was permanent, only to have it pop like a bubble in my face. Now the best I can do is to wish them well. 

“Maybe this is growing up, learning to live with what you’ve been dealt,” I wrote then. “I think of my past self, how she would walk and feel and live and be, and how she has no god damn idea. Maybe the present is nothing more than feeling blindly for what’s to come.” 

I’ve always regarded the One Direction concert as some sort of desperate last hurrah, if only in terms of keeping up the pretense that I was doing well in school. But I know now that it was larger than that. It became a turning point, the end of an era, a certain finality to my youth. 

That night, just minutes after the concert finished, the streets were already clearing faster than I was expecting. We walked and saw them riddled with paraphernalia, and the physical proof was a relief. It all seemed so ephemeral all of a sudden, like they would poof away and it’d be like it never even happened. (How does “Night Changes” go again?) We waited out the dark at a gas station Family Mart having a 1 a.m. dinner of cup noodles. We tried to take turns napping, but I gave up and read The Disenchantments on my phone—a novel about young adults coming of age against a backdrop of music, temporary places, endings, and uncertain beginnings. 

At 6 a.m. I looked through the window and for some reason was surprised to see it was fully light out. It couldn’t possibly be morning. It couldn’t possibly be over. It couldn’t possibly belong in the past.

Alyssa and I decided to head out then—Camille still had her day-two VIP experience to look forward to. We got on a bus, our exhaustion giving way to a comfortable silence. My mind was already on other things. Neither of us spoke the entire time. 

I was going home, and I knew I couldn’t be stuck in suspension forever. I had to come clean. The days that would follow my confession about my non-graduation would be scary and miserable. I didn’t know then that I would find my way eventually, even if it took a few more wrong turns and plenty of time. I didn’t realize that my parents were on my side. Now that I’m older and I got to figure these parts out, I can recognize the power, bravery, and freedom of facing the coming changes and taking the next step forward, even if it meant letting go of what was safe and familiar.

The bus passed Coastal Mall, which I’d known from childhood. This place that I hadn’t seen in years and years was now dilapidated and abandoned—lonely, eerie, and in ruins. All around it, new buildings thrived, modern and edgy, and all it could do was fold it on itself and become lost in time, in a moment that’s simply no longer. Seeing it, along with the sleep deprivation, the anxiety, and a longing for all that took place only hours before, left me unable to figure out what I felt. But the sun was bright and the skies were clear and could tomorrow really be so bad if it looked like this? Anything could happen, and so many things were waiting for me. 

The future was wide open.