Dearest friend,
I don’t know why it still surprises me, but I honestly can’t believe spring is already here. It feels just a couple of weeks ago that I was writing to you about new year’s resolutions and second beginnings, and here we are with what is, technically, the first of nature’s beginnings in the year. Living where I am, the seasons tend to get quite tricky, because what passes for spring here in Ontario is a medley of all four seasons; it isn’t unheard of, in fact even a little expected, to experience sun, hail and rain all in the same March afternoon, and all month, I’ve passed bus stops with one person waiting in a puffer and the other in shorts. It makes me laugh a little, every year, even as I work through the tedious labor of tucking away my winter coats and cable-knits to replace them with summer t-shirts and light jackets that I can layer and peel off depending on how the sky wants to remind me of climate change that day.
It’s the closest thing I do to spring cleaning, except maybe with the addition of cleaning up my digital spaces. This year, I deleted the Tumblr sideblogs I don’t use as much as I’d like, cleaned up audio files from the last time Pro Tools and I had a lot of quality time with each other for my functional adult job, even did some much-needed mass deletion of screenshots that ultimately did nothing to free up substantial storage on my phone. But immediately before this, I was cleaning through my Notes app and found a draft for an Instagram caption that I meant to use for a concert I attended in 2019. I don’t think I ever ended up pushing through with the actual post I wanted to use it for, probably because the caption is trying its best to be chill about it all but is in fact very, very cheesy — though it’s still a wonder to me, to a gentle understated degree, how much earnestness shines through despite that teeth-gritting sentimentality.
My caption reads:
everyone shut up it’s that time of the year again when i feel pcd like i’ve never felt it before
believe me when i say i hate veering on the side of overly sentimental when it comes to posts dedicated to celebrities but this might be the last time i’ll ever see these guys live so to hell with that: thank you for keeping me company during the two most difficult years i’ve had to survive & (for urging me towards recovery and) for reminding me i can still laugh even when i’m near catatonic with the worst of this annoying mental health shebang. nothing has cheered me up in this period of my life quite like your dumbassery has, & nothing has given me comfort quite as much as singing in the shower to your entire discography (read: turbulence) every time my body refuses to do literally anything that would grant catharsis bc it just. hates me. i guess.
verse 2 was no bounce 2.0, but a bop is a bop and i’m surprised i even got the cb i prayed for. so thank you to jjp for giving musical representation to my own worries and sentiments that year, for reflecting back to me what my own intentions as a creator might look like if seen through & for giving me such warmth despite that era coming alongside the most painful stuff i’ve ever had to do and recover from. that could have been an even worse psychological disaster than it was. i’ll make my own verse 2 someday. hopefully. or not. maybe i just jinxed it.
i’m getting better. i like to think that’s thanks in no small part to the weeks and months i was able to survive day by day with your help. weeks that turned into months and then years, and will hopefully someday become a decade and more. hopefully. but until then, thank you for everything from the ridiculous inside jokes to the genuine advice for my existentialism to the intimate v lives.
y’all were a headache to stan though not gonna lie i’m carrying so much beef to my grave with like. four out of seven of you. virgo line — stay true, be you.
one out two out three out i’m out 🐥
It’s like — Can you tell I was barely twenty by the flippant tone that was everything but that? Because I can. So painfully young, by comparison to how I feel now. I’d very likely write it a lot differently as I currently am, but I still do stand by everything I said in that caption, unpublished as it remained. This group was a headache to stan, for one, if only because they were so unfiltered for idols, and yet it had been precisely for that reason that they’d done what I said they’d done — got me through each day to the next, got laughter out of me even when I couldn’t even cry over the things I was supposed to, and on more serious moments, even provided a framework for the kind of creative output I wanted to commit myself to once I was better. And I am better now, even more than I already said I was writing that caption. I am better, even as I fear, writing this, that I have already jinxed that, too, that this past couple of months have been too kind simply because they have been kinder than the year before. In those respects, much has changed with me, and much hasn’t.
How right I was, too, about that night being the last time I will see this group in a concert. I think I knew, seeing them that night, that they wouldn’t be renewing with their company upon the expiration of their contract. Maybe it even helped that I knew, because if you could forgive me for compacting the width of already narrow parasocial relationships and the emotional attachment we form towards our celebrities, I was able to say goodbye that night, in a way.
Goodbye to them, yes, because while the group isn’t formally disbanded — all the members are in different companies now, active in their own solo paths, with a few sparks of warmth here and there when the internet algorithms I’m part of brings me a tiny clip or compilation or meme — it’s highly unlikely they’ll ever go on tour again. We might get another album or three someday, maybe a handful of live stages, but I wouldn’t see them live. And that’s okay. In saying goodbye to them through that concert, I think I was also glad for the opportunity to say goodbye to the me that had needed them. Really, truly needed them, latching onto the figures of these celebrities as an anchor for something no human being should be responsible for. People always say that we shouldn’t put our celebrities up on a pedestal, and I agree, but I wonder if that’s the phrase I would use for the ways I loved this one idol group. It felt the opposite of putting them up a pedestal, how I relied on them. If anything, it was my loved ones I placed on a distance, never to see me wrestling with the emotions and thoughts I was drowning under in that time period; this group, on the other hand, these seven idols, I dragged down to the earth with me, because they would be none the wiser of it, because these people, just like how I will never actually know who they are, will never have to truly bear the burden of being down in the dirt with me.
I hadn’t thought the world of them, really. I didn’t think they were perfect people, nor that they were an otherworldly kind of talented and handsome. But I took comfort in the symbols they functioned as, because sometimes all it takes to remind you how to feel human is to feel yourself react to another person. And with celebrities, with people you can watch from a distance or a screen without guilt because the voluntary public-ness of their personas removed the feeling of voyeurism — It felt okay, in ways I wouldn’t have wanted for or around my loved ones. It felt okay to be a little worse for wear when I started tearing up over their songs. It felt okay to laugh at their cake decoration and failed ASMR videos. The comfort they provided wasn’t because their songs soothed me, in themselves, or gave me a different outlook in life, or because any of it moved me artistically the way that I know some people are moved by their celebrity of choice’s creative work. For me, with this group, it was like playing old voicemails from a friend you trust. That same level of closeness, because it’s a friend you know and a voicemail you’ve memorized by heart by now. And so it is also that same level of distance, because at the end of the day, your friend isn’t actually talking to the you of that particular moment. There’s no one else in the room with you. Just you and the warmth of this disembodied voice. Just you and the words you know so well you can afford to not have to understand them anymore. Just you and something so distant and so personal it was the opposite, and the things you don’t do and don’t have to think because it wasn’t complete absence or silence you’re left with.
The other day, I bumped into one of the members of this same group on a Twitter account I wasn’t expecting to see him in. It was a video clip of his recent solo work, and while his fans had seen glimpses before of the music he wanted to be doing outside of the grip of his old company, it was another thing altogether to see it in action. Everything was as familiar as it was completely different: his style, his singing, his music video backdrops, even his song titles and featured artists. It felt totally alien, seeing him like that, but in a way that I was surprised to find myself wistful about. I know, as perpetual distant audiences to the lives of public figures, that we can never be sure about what goes on behind the scenes. Even still, it had felt good to see him blossoming, at least from my perspective, outside of the context I got to know him and his group in.
But also — For a split second, there was this sudden, uncomfortable, primal awareness of how different we both were: him in the small rectangle of my phone screen, no more aware of my existence and relationship with him than he had been before, and me sitting in the spring sunlight, having toast and coffee at 4 PM, everything inside me wrapped in more stillness than I could have ever imagined back when I would have had this same song downloaded into my phone two hours after a midnight release to keep me company on the anxiety-riddled commute to school. There was shock there, in that awareness. Shock at how different a relationship this is now, with how different we are as people, with how different our lives have become. Free of each other, in a way, without really knowing each other. Him, free of the watchfulness of the industry he spent more than a decade in, free of the watching I participated in as an audience member. And me, free, maybe, from the demands and trappings of seeing him with eyes only hungry for something to feel. It was just him. Just another k-hiphop artist open on my screen. It was just me. Just another twenty-something eating a light breakfast in the afternoon to dutifully take my antidepressants before a project meeting I was excited about.
Isn’t that strange? How lives can overlap like that without really ever crossing? So much of my relationships with celebrities have been marked by grief, by loss, and yet this one hadn’t been at all. It had been a clean break with their old company. From what I can see, they are all thriving in different corners of the industry, in different parts of the world. A lot of fans out there have been less lucky with their idols. With mine, I want for nothing. They don’t shy away from talking about each other in their solo press. They don’t hide that the past seven years happened. The dynamic that had me gravitating towards them remains in place, even if slightly different now, with bigger distances to cross and more things to navigate and no annual comebacks to hope for. It’s all so — still. Peaceful. The gentlest I have seen life be. The kindest, in how much closure there is. They aren’t even a friend I just gradually drifted apart from, because I know it will be so easy, should I want it, to open a playlist or a YouTube video and revisit all of the good they gave me like no time has passed at all. There had been no drifting, because drifting implies separation, fading. There had been no breaking. No losing. Just all of us moving on, as one inevitably must, in life.
So I suppose it was a shock to see that Instagram caption. The timelessness of it, the almost circularity of its significance in my life. So much of my sentimental moments are fragmentary, unique to the period I am writing about, but while this caption is as much a snapshot of who I am in that moment as any emotional thing I write, maybe even including this newsletter, I can’t quite say that the me who wrote that caption is foreign, indistinct, unrecognizable. I still know them, that Sha. I still am them. It’s still an us, a we, and not two different selves reckoning with something I feel differently about now. There is comfort, in knowing that even as everyone at both points of this atypical relationship have all moved on with our lives, this moving on has erased nothing.
How many things in life can I say that about?
There’s a book I read recently, and I don’t know how to describe it to you except to say that I loved it and it comforted me and saddened me and touched me in less than fifty pages, but it’s Love Speech by Xiao Xuan / Sherry Huang, and among many lines that left my heart constricted, here is one from the mouth of my favorite section of the book:
Sometimes a show is a show and sometimes it is the only thing that can help me go on.
Another one, a couple pages after:
I don’t want to have just anything with just anyone.
I want something that will endure.
So that even when it ends it doesn’t.
With people and with art, it’s forward carrying power that matters.
Then, the beginning of my undoing:
Nostalgia has a way of being everything, a different kind of remembering. An earlobe pressed into the heart kind of knowing.
When you are being lit by the moon, you are being lit by the sun.
The moon is an icon. Its light is the loved thing from the day you can stare at in the night.
And, the words I’ve been wanting to say this whole time, this whole newsletter, cobbled together from different pages because it’s better than attempting to articulate it all myself:
Having a poem or song is having a perfect unit capable of making a mood reoccur.
A poem or a song could be like a long eye cried into for the duration of a night.
Right here is an impossible localizing of what you do to me. And I know that what you do to me you will keep doing to me
right now & always.
You know, I used to feel detached when my friends in high school would cry over posts about saying goodbye to the idols of their youth. Posts about a final goodbye when you know it really is over, or maybe revisiting it all years later, knowing that your love for this or that group, this or that musician, is what made your coming-of-age what it was. When a member from one group I loved as a teen passed away just months after the only time I saw him and his group live, I felt only stillness with that loss. Numbness, almost, because I knew that when I loved intensely, it was often only to cope with that numbness, to mask it, to stuff something into the empty slots of me before numbness could slip in there. But it wasn’t numbness, that night of the concert I wrote that Instagram caption for. It isn’t numbness now, either, looking back, seeing how far we have all come since.
Still, though I know we’re long past the days of thinking it odd when people take comfort in public figures, that hasn’t stopped me from feeling silly about all this, even as I dissect the finer details of it, the more human motivations and needs. It’s all still very silly, but also strange, and awful, and comforting, to know that once upon a time, this one group, their place in my life culminating in that final concert, hadn’t been just one group and just one concert, but had been the only thing to help me go on.
It’s silly, and strange, and awful, and comforting, to know that as we all move forward with life, the past will keep being the past, and at most, all I can hope for is nostalgia, because nostalgia means not just remembering, but remembering with feeling. And that was all I ever asked of them, wasn’t it? To feel. And so all I ask now, of the world, is to remember. Because nostalgia really is like being lit by the moon, isn’t it, if being lit by the moon is to also be lit by the sun, by the remnant light absorbed and left for us in the night? Because there are fractionary optics and layers and reflections there, and it won’t ever quite be the same thing as experiencing direct sunlight, but does it matter, at the end of the day? It’s enough, to have felt that light once, from the sun or under the moon, and it’s enough, to know that for as long as the earth rotates in its place, and for as long as I live on this earth, the one thing that will remain certain is that the sun and the moon will keep rising and falling, rising and falling, as clockwork as the seasons. It’s enough, that I have this one Instagram caption and all it stands for. It’s enough, that I know I am better than the better I already believed in back then.
It’s enough, because I also know that what they did for me, they will keep doing to me, right now and always. Because who am I if not the products of the people and relationships — friend or stranger or the stranger-friends that the celebrities we love are to us — who pushed me along day to day until that day became now, right here, today? So much of us are products of the kindness given to us by others, however minuscule, however inconsequential and impersonal in the long run. It isn’t the immediacy or significance of the moment that matters, really, by that point. It’s what it led to, what it produced. Because with people and with art, as Sherry Huang wrote in Love Speech, it’s forward carrying power that matters.
My friend — I’ve really missed writing to you. I hope you’re well.
Your huckleberry friend,
Sha
this letter hit real close for me. thank you !
Dear Huckleberry friend, I second this "Because who am I if not the products of the people and relationships.. we are products of the kindness given to us by others". Thank you for sharing this unique perspective of life. I wish that many kind days fill your coming days! <3