More than anything, I prepared for the weather.
On the day of the very last concert of the Hope on the Stage Tour, I set out for Goyang at half past four in the afternoon, wanting to get there just before it started. It took me about a couple dozen stops and an hour on the subway along with two minutes at a crosswalk to get there. The weather forecast said there was a high probability of rain, so I’d packed a couple of disposable raincoats. I hadn’t tried them before, but I was surprised that they weighed like nothing but offered full coverage (and were very cost-efficient) and they instantly became a travel must-have for me.
But it was nearing 7 p.m. and the sun was still high up. The girls in the seats around me and I got our umbrellas out and shared them to protect ourselves not from a downpour, but from the glare—the kind of community that really makes my heart feel full on days like this.
This time around, I wanted to give out my own gifts, and I called on a hobby I hadn’t practiced in maybe a decade: shrink plastic. I had so many ring backs and other trinket supplies lying around, so I decided to make rings adorned with the butterfly confetti that falls during “On the Street.” I spent days testing for the right size, painstakingly cutting them out of thick plastic sheets, baking, and gluing them onto the rings. I also got an idea to create a charm bracelet to commemorate the tour, and it was so fun to bring it to life.
I distributed them to the people in the seats around me, and some of them wore the rings right away. I was also excited that everyone with a ticket was given a towel with this really cool design as well as the cutest photocard of Hoseok posing with his little chipmunk doll counterpart, which I immediately slid into a toploader for safekeeping. (Always bring multiple sleeves and toploaders to events like this because you just never know!)
First show. Last show. A few others in between. Watching him rise to the stage as it pounded like a heart around him for the last time in a while, I thought about how the first time felt like holding my breath in anticipation of what would happen next, and now it felt like an exhale. I knew every pulse, every beat. Every rise, every fall. I clapped before he even asked.
I knew it all by heart.
I’d brought an Aquapix to the first concert and tried to take a few shots, but it had been loaded with a Himalaya 200 so you can barely make out anything in them. This time around, I made sure to bring ISO 800 film, and it worked wonderfully against the setting sun and the glittering dark. I’ll never get tired of how the sprawling gradient blue of the skies turns out on what’s essentially a toy camera.
After the concert, the stage design went viral again when people observed that the boxes spell out “j-hope” during “STOP,” which was always fun for me to see.
At first I thought, “How could you not have noticed through the entire tour?” But then I realized that not everyone had gotten to attend and it’s not one of the common moments people would post online. It made me wonder if any of the other details I’d grown to look for and adore with every stop had flown under the radar, and I hope I always remember them when I rewatch the streams and look back.
Through it all I tried to be as present as I could. Even today I feel like I’d get so wrapped up in the moment when he would freestyle to “On the Street,” like it was something I could never quite fathom even when I was seeing it with my own eyes. Like I kept trying to get a grasp on it, convinced that if I just looked hard enough it would become part of me, but it was the kind of thing that only ever left an impression. Precious and fleeting and ephemeral and it was best that way. Not unlike the butterflies that elegantly drifted around him as he moved.
“Remember the time in KSPO Dome?” he asked, like I could ever forget. “When I asked you to memorize the lyrics to ‘i wonder’?” You mean when I harmonized with you from my seat and I had an inkling of what heaven could be like?
“When was that? Four months? Three months ago? I’m so happy that I was able to hear your voices. It’s beautiful to the very end, so sweet to the very end. How can I ever forget you guys? I’ve heard your voices while I performed all over the world, and it’s something I cannot express with words. It’s sweetness itself.”
So we sang with him one more time.
Then—and not to ruin this moment with, um, something decidedly not pure and sweet—I braced myself.
I’d loved the previous outfit and thought he couldn’t have been more attractive. When it was time for “Killin’ It Girl”—released just the day before, so this was the second performance ever—somehow I just knew he would emerge from that wall of dancers… more creatively dressed than usual. Like his re-emergence in October and this whole entire era had been leading up to this. And yet there was no way to be ready about any of it when you’ve been here as long as I have.
Questions raced through my mind as the entire stadium erupted into the screams of almost 30,000 individuals: Where did his shirt go? Are we being serious right now? How is this happening? Is this what our lives are going to be like from now on? Am I really here bearing firsthand witness to history?
And the question that has plagued me for all time since: What has he done and why has he done this? To us? To me?
And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, a horrifying realization dawned on me: this is literally the longest segment of the show, with over a dozen songs, and he would be (half-)dressed like this the entire. Fucking. Time. Did he not care that I was barely clinging to my sanity.
I was so right to prioritize the very last date. I love every choice that led me here. Including pouring out my every feeling about pretty much the whole tour set list when I wrote about the Seoul concerts, because now I can just focus on being rendered at a loss for words.
An immediate thought I had was that I wished I could tell my mom, and I still so desperately do.
Looking like a whole Interpol album cover.
The final official stop of the tour had been Osaka. On the second day his voice had turned careful, pensive.
“One last thing,” he said. “I worked hard, almost to the point of breaking down, knowing that this moment would never come back. Really, every performance.” He smiled, but then he was crying. “I really came here with all my might. Even though I was feeling unwell, I did my best, and because this performance is very meaningful and important to me, I have worked hard to get to this point.”
“I thought I wouldn’t cry,” he went on, “once I turned 30. I thought I wouldn’t cry anymore after I finished the military. As I’ve said before, the moment the performance begins, I make a vow. I really took on this with a great sense of responsibility, and every performance was a tour I took on with a vow and resolve, so I was overwhelmed with emotion.”
And in true Aquarius fashion, he finished with, “Sorry for the long story.”
And of course, in Goyang, he was tearful once more as he launched into the ending ment that would close out not just that night, but the tour and the season that had passed as it went on. It was strange to hear it all without the full context right then, unable to access translations, only going off of the handful of words I could understand and his gestures. But being right there, crying along with him, was the only thing that mattered.
“Everything I did today, things that were a routine to me, was the very last time today,” he began. “The soundcheck, hair, makeup, stage, sunglasses, everything was the very last time. I always used to clench my teeth and push through every stage, but today I had to perform each one with the thought of letting it go, for the last time. So it made me emotional and tear up all the way here.”
As j-hope, he continued, “I will perform for you, I’ll dance, rap, and sing for you until the last moment my body allows me to. In these past four months, thanks to you I realized how much I need to value and take care of myself. I bow my head to you once again in gratitude. Thank you so much!”
This part I definitely understood, and it still makes my heart pinch thinking about it months later: “I was happy!” he was saying, his voice climbing to an exhilarated shout. “I was so happy! I’ll come back when I get the chance again!”
We all began cheering, “Saranghae!” Over and over. So he returned it, and we gave it to him right back, just like he deserved.
I couldn’t help but be hyper-aware of my own firsts and lasts of the tour as he spoke. Three months passed between Seoul and Goyang, and I know I’ll be able to think back on all of it as such an unprecedented, inimitable, happy time in my life. Traveling, spending time with friends I hold so dear, meeting new people, and five nights that feel like everything I needed in the moment, everything I’ve ever wanted, and everything I’ve ever loved and lived for. Finding out that I can do this on my own, but I didn’t have to go through it alone.
It drained me, it caused me genuine distress, it made me feel more alive than I had in a while, it healed me.
It had me flying to Singapore for a weekend all over again with nothing but a backpack and a ticket, blinking my eyes against a stadium ceiling that looked straight out of Stranger Things (no longer such a cool reference to make, but I wanted to point it out anyway).
I stayed at NuVe Urbane in Lavender again, this time in a room with not just a window, but a balcony. I wish I’d had more time and energy to explore the surrounding neighborhood and take pictures, but I really only had time to fly in Friday night, go to the concert on Saturday, then fly out Sunday morning.
I did go on a 7-Eleven run, where the old man at the register nodded knowingly at the honey lemon Fisherman’s Friend I was buying and declared with approval, “Yes, that’s new, isn’t it?” As a proponent of the lozenge brand with flu or without, I definitely found it to be one of my best interactions of the year.
I went with Alissa, and I couldn’t believe it was their first concert ever. And what a concert to start with! With floor tickets, it was the best view I had out of the whole tour, and we gradually got closer to the stage as the night progressed. I was especially insistent on getting a good vantage point for “Mona Lisa.”
(It hadn’t been released yet during Seoul, so I just want to add here that the day it came out, I got a 5-digit raise at work following a year of major growth and progress, according to the higher ups. “Independent check, got her own check”? So true.)
The butterflies were falling over my head for once during “On the Street.” They came in three colors and two shapes, and with lighter material and a higher volume, while the effect wasn’t as artful or gentle, it felt to me like another kind of magic and I loved watching them come down and getting to collect more of them than I knew what to do with.
For the segment where they flashed some signs onscreen, they actually showed one adorned with rainbows that said Gays ♡ j-hope, and I was excited knowing he would be able to see it from backstage.
I cried for the first time all tour (while the concert was still ongoing, that is) in Singapore. After “Neuron” ended, Alissa and I just looked at each other, tears ready to be blinked into running down our cheeks.
A silly thought, but Hoseok is such an Aquarius in the way he admitted that he deliberately avoided moments that would induce crying on his solo tour. But the fact that he managed to make this song, as the finale, feel extra poignant and emotional anyway? That’s pure Pisces mercury at work.
We had dinner at a Korean rice bowl place where I ordered a decadent salmon with teriyaki sauce and a creamy mentaiko topping. We’d met up in the afternoon around the stadium, but we left for a couple of hours to go to a cafe. It rained really hard while we were there, but I was once again struck by how seamless life felt in this city that is an island that is a city. How convenient it was, how connected everything is. You could while away time in good company before a concert, head back with less than an hour to spare, and be right back with minimal walking and no rush.
Alissa saw me off at the station, where I got on the last train just before it set off. It was two stops from Lavender and the walk back was almost like being carried on a cloud to the hotel despite my aching legs. I bought a paper cup of freshly squeezed cold orange juice from the machine outside. It was nice.
In the morning I went on the balcony for a bit, and before long, it was time for me to leave.
In Manila, there was no other person I could’ve experienced this with but Amrie.
I still can’t believe he gave us a hometown show. The name of this city I adore on his tour poster, on the shirts and keepsakes, on the Louis Vuitton suitcase that opens up to reveal his boombox. The streets that have been part of me my whole life and for as long as I’ll live becoming a part of his own history in the most special way.
Amrie and I stood in front of the MOA Globe for hours, the crowds thinning around us until we were the only two people left, the words and emotions—and, eventually, tears—pouring out of us like they would never stop. Mostly about what we’d just gone through that night, but also about the last several years of watching him lay down every brick that’s made up this long, difficult, but inevitable and painstakingly earned path. Getting to overcome along with him, and getting to do it together.
My first true impression of Hoseok was marked with the thought: So that’s who he is. I’d spent months reading his name from Amrie’s Twitter username, and watching the “IDOL” music video for the first time and witnessing him deliver his first verse, I felt like I finally got it. Literally bouncing into frame, almost like he could transcend the screen, sounding unlike nobody I’d ever heard before. And it says so much about him that I still feel that way whenever I listen to that song.
“I didn’t think I still loved him like that,” Amrie said, just after we both decided we didn’t care that we were full on crying in public. “But he just proved to me that I probably always will.”
An aspect of the tour that I’ve loved getting to see was Hoseok’s resolve to experience and enjoy the local cuisine of every city he visited. He really embraced his inner Anthony Bourdain and expressed the importance of not just eating well but eating as an act of joy and indulgence. It was evident in his variety show appearances, his social posts, his livestreams. I also realized in those months that I barely knew how far his sweet tooth really went.
In Manila, he fell in love with halo-halo and savored his dinner from Manam: crispy pata, garlic rice, crispy sisig (his favorite, he says), and sinigang na baboy sa sampaloc—which people ordered as a set so often that it became an unofficial “j-hope Meal” for a time.
On a show, talking about his enlistment period and why he stayed at the camp where he trained, he shared,
“I was eating meals after training and the food there was just so delicious. They served things like mala tteokbokki, and I thought, ‘I have to stay here.’ Then I started thinking, ‘What do I have to do to stay here?’ and I realized I needed to become a teaching assistant. So I studied and studied for a month, and if you pass the evaluation, you become a TA. I had to study six subjects within a set time. I thought, ‘If I had studied English like this, I would’ve [excelled].”
Drive-thru burgers, home-cooked steak, his signature Hope Toast with eggs and bacon and strawberry jam, his ultimate comfort food bibimmyeon. It’s made me so happy getting to see him enjoy his life full and nourished. As he said on Chef & My Fridge, “I began to want to eat something delicious if I’m going to eat something.”
Even his gifts for fans during his “Killin’ It Girl” promotions have been so wonderful and hearty: tomato-shaped bagels with cream cheese and pesto, acorn cookies, frozen yogurt with chocolate shells and fruit toppings.
And I know I’ve been talking about him revealing his abs like it’s a psychological torture experiment designed for my personal torment, but I swear from an art appreciation perspective and as someone who cares about his well-being, it has allowed me to map out how his body really ripples and moves when he’s performing, and seeing all these facets of it I never considered keeps reminding me of this excerpt from a fic Amrie and I have loved:
He goes in for a hug, and she accepts it though she doesn’t really want to. But, for such a skinny guy, there’s a surprising amount of him, and for someone so sharp, he’s gentle with her.
And it goes hand in hand with this philosophy he’s been putting into action with food. This body, there truly is a surprising amount of him, strong and soft in equal measure. I love how healthy it is and how its topography is traced by his life of dance.
It’s so nice to me how the memory spreads from each city are so different. People have been showcasing their own memory boxes for Hope on the Stage that they can display, but I’m pretty content with my choice of storing them all in an opaque black box so they’re protected from light damage. I also enjoy the process of laying them out on my scanner and seeing the results.
The Manila spread includes some super cute Hobi x Snoopy pins, two of my favorite dolls that I brought along in the ita bag I’d gotten just for the occasion, a sticker designed to look like jeepney signages, freebies such as a bracelet from the girl next to me, a squirrel mask that had been part of a fan project, a Hope World tamagotchi earring from Aya whom I met for the first time that night, and a peso bill confetti from the “Hope World” performance. It means so, so much to me that I actually caught one all the way from lower box! I watched it wide-eyed as it flew through the air and scrambled to catch it just as it landed in my seat. Amrie caught one just a few minutes later, and we screamed together as we clutched them to our chests and hugged.
The Singapore spread includes an MRT pass, my plane ticket, a receipt from our dinner, an adorable glittered NFC-powered mini CD with an even tinier random photocard, a Snoopy “Mona Lisa” art print, and the butterfly confetti I’d collected. I love the effect of the other mementos peeking through their sheer material. So pretty.
Finally, for the Goyang spread, I put together stuff from the concert, LEEGOC’s exhibit, and of course, And What?
The week after the final concerts, he posted a letter that made me cry harder than I ever did when I was actually there. “Looks like I’m not going to be able to stop thinking about it all,” he began. He wrote about having a deep sense of resonance from the last several months, of being immersed in and accomplishing his work with great love, affection, and care. Of coming to believe in himself and becoming more strong and secure and unshakeable.
“I really learnt a lot, felt a lot, and I think that the attitude I’ve gained is going to make me consider and approach my next steps with even more care… Since I set out on my solo journey in 2022, I’ve experienced being sick, and tried healing myself, and felt a great sense of accomplishment, and developed confidence.”
A translator used the words “tremendous fulfillment” to describe what he had felt, which was what did it for me.
Some excerpts from another translation that helped me understand how beautiful the feelings he was trying to express were:
“I can’t seem to get over the lingering feelings,” highlighting his use of “여운” which the translator says indicates “a feeling or image that remains even after the experience is over.”
“I must have considered it all precious as I did it, right? I tried not to miss out on any part of it. I acted with painstaking consideration… Since 2022, I’ve been working as a solo artist, tried running into things to see if it hurts, and then tried healing myself, and I felt a huge sense of accomplishment.”
When the lights came down after “Neuron” I just had this feeling, this strong sense that it wasn’t over yet.
All tour long I’d been a little sad that “Safety Zone,” which some days I would call my favorite out of all j-hope tracks, had been left out of the set list. I hadn’t even sat back down yet, hadn’t even made a decision about what I was going to do now that it was all over just like that, before the lights flashed back on and the intro that made my chest ache in the best way from the first time I heard it was suddenly washing over the stadium. It sounded so much more poignant and whole with the live band, and with his raw, emotional delivery. Just him, just his mic, just the stage. And just us, the sea of people who loved him.
The name of the tour transforming into Hope on the Safety Zone behind him, letting us all know where he had found solace.
I feel heavy typing this, like I’m about to cry. I couldn’t imagine a better way to close out this whole chapter than with this song, and I feel so lucky I was there. I never wanted it to end, so of course it was over much too soon.
The girl next to me was called Jessica. I can’t remember if she was originally from Hong Kong and now she lived in Australia or the other way around, but she had a wonderfully friendly Aussie accent and all the same, it meant that she had traveled far to be here, just like me. She’d given me one of those charming clip-on koalas that I recently remembered from childhood and wondered where they’d gone.
And when “Safety Zone” ended, she pulled out a packet of scented tissues with Mang on the packaging and handed one to me, no questions asked. Because of course we both had tears streaming down our faces. It’s still probably buried in my bag somewhere.
I’d bought a ticket to a shuttle that would let me off at Hapjeong Station, just two stops from Sinchon. It was a fifteen-minute walk from the stadium to the parking lot where the buses were and it was an extra expense that wasn’t all that cheap, but I think I chose well. The subway would’ve been a crowded nightmare, and on the bus I could sit and lean my head against the window watching the certainty of the night sky against the whirling scenery. Thinking about my favorite line from the song still lingering in my head: The world changes fast, and at every moment, a different feeling of loneliness hits me.
And I may have been lonely. But I found that I don’t mind.
The trains were dangerously close to ending their run for the day when I got off in Hapjeong and rushed to the platform. Just like the night I arrived, the streets in Sinchon were hardly empty when I exited the station. My dinner was microwave carbonara from 7-Eleven—the noodles perfectly al dente, the sauce the kind of bland I found comforting, buttery and soupy and just what I needed while sitting cross-legged in front of the TV.
Just like the Seoul stop, I’d once again gone within the space of an hour from seeing j-hope live to watching him on cable television. Yet another layer that’s made the experience so much fuller, so much more fun than I ever thought possible. Perfect timing, perfect planning down to the tiniest detail.
When I got home, the first thing I did was finally draw the other eye on the Daruma doll I’d used to make a wish: to take the most I can get out of this tour, to experience it to the fullest. I’ve used a total of two Daruma dolls in my life, and in my experience, they’re quite powerful, hopeful little things.
Back in Seoul I’d set off for the airport at 4 a.m. Everything was dark and still. The weather was moody, pouring over the bridges and bodies of water we crossed as we drove. It’s so silly and a little melodramatic, but it was a sweet and soothing thought, the idea that we were in the same city while it was raining.
Just for a little while longer, anyway.
I held onto this thought, this feeling, as the plane took off and my life went on.