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 tofight 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.
Chapter 43
Becka laughed as I slumped into the chair opposite her.
