Page 40

February 28

Singapore

Despite seeing the temperature displayed on the little TV screen nearly the entire seven-hour flight to Singapore, I was still unprepared for how much hotter it was than Japan. It was as if I had gotten on a plane in spring and landed in summer.

Waiting outside for the crew bus, hot and tired, and feeling the humidity curling my hair, made my still-weird mood worse. I felt a sort of thrumming anxiety under my skin. My nails were stubs and more than once I’d had to forcibly stop my leg from bouncing on the plane.

Crowds were gathered on the pavement further up outside the doors from arrivals, and I knew the moment that GVibes exited the building, because the ambient, low-level chattering suddenly went from background noise to high-pitched screaming that bounced off the metal and glass walls of the airport.

I couldn’t see the group from here, but I watched as the crowd swelled and pitched like the waves of an ocean.

The members and their immediate team had gotten transfers down to an art. Straight through the crowds into the cars and away. Usually they would stop for a few moments to wave, but not Jihoon. Never Jihoon. He had never said it, but crowds in uncontrolled environments scared him. I’d seen it in the tense set of his shoulders, the way his jaw clenched.

There were too many videos of people getting past security, too many videos of idols being chased through airports. It was one of the reasons why I’d been so shocked to see the footage of him and Lee Hyejin walking through the airport holding hands. It was so public, so overt. It hadn’t been the only reason I’d been so taken aback. Even now, with the hindsight that their relationship had been fake, a wave of nausea twisted my stomach. I clenched my jaw and forced myself to turn away.

I wanted to marvel at the city as we drove through it, at the shining monoliths that dominated the skyline, and all the vibrant crowds at ground level, but it was like the more I tried, the more I was aware I was forcing myself to think about something else. I was a pressure valve close to my limit.

As soon as we got to the hotel, I dumped my bags in my room and then took myself out into the city. I needed a wide open space. I needed a distraction. I needed to to be anywhere where he wasn’t. Where this tour wasn’t. I needed to breathe.

I got lost, of course. I hadn’t downloaded a map onto my phone, and I only got phone service when I ducked into a coffee shop and used the WiFi for the cost of a matcha latte and a doughnut. But the excursion did what I’d needed it to do as I felt my blood cool, the nervous anxiety humming beneath my skin quieting into background noise as the noise of the city filtered through. I sat at the window looking out at Singapore and was finally able to remind myself that holy shit, I was in Singapore. I was travelling the world.

Not everything needed to be about him. Or even me. I was here, on my dream assignment and I needed to remember that.

The next few days disappeared into work. I threw myself into it with the kind of abandon that had me passing out each night the moment my head hit the pillow. I felt detached in a way that allowed me to document the experience of the Singaporean shows in minute detail, even when embedded in a crowd. This included capturing the moment that the fan project lit up the entire left and right sides of the stadium with an Auriga light show, forming the constellation with Viber lightsticks along the back of the stadium. It was breathtaking.

For several minutes the members just watched from the stage in awe as Auriga shone throughout the entire stadium, entirely organised by local fans. It was a visual representation of the relationship between GVibes and Vibers, and I considered it a privilege to witness it.

Before this, I had started to view the concerts as a series of beats, knowing exactly what would come next, even if the shows varied slightly per stop. I had memorised the opening VCR, the moment the lightsticks would sync and send the crowds into a frenzy, the set list. Moments like this helped to remind me that for the fans all over the world these were something brand new, with brand-new moments with each stop.

It was humbling.

March 5th

Bangkok

Somewhere between Singapore and Bangkok the tour had stopped feeling like a series of stops on a map and more like a great, moving organism. We were constantly in motion. Airport to airport, bus to hotel, hotel to venue and back again. Day in, day out. Moving, moving, moving.

Bangkok was louder in every way. Somehow hotter, more humid and absolutely more overwhelming. We were ferried from the airport in a convoy of identical shuttles, and the fans at the airport mobbed us, screaming so loudly their voices rattled the windows. I stared out into a sea of faces and not for the first time wondered how anyone could get used to a life like this.

The city was chaos that funnelled down streets with no regard for person or vehicle. Neon lights glinted off the windows, motorbikes roared between vans, people crossed the street with seemingly no regard for safety. I was so exhausted that everything had started to feel surreal, but I got the impression that Bangkok would have been like that anyway.

On more than one occasion I woke up in a hotel room, unable to remember if we had travelled the day before, or if I had stayed late after a concert. I’d had to get up and walk over to the desk to look at the hotel name on the room service menu to check which country we were in.

The routine rarely seemed to change.

Get up, go down to breakfast, have a team meeting, go to the venue – depending on the day – come back to the hotel or go out for dinner, and on break days go out into whatever city we were in.

Although the novelty of buying souvenirs had long since worn off, I did sometimes tag along with Sihyeon.

Jackson alternated his travel. For half of the stops, he would travel with the main crew; for the other half, he would be on the leap-frog crew, already setting up a stop ahead, so I didn’t get to see him often. I made friends with other people on the permanent tour staff, people from all other departments that I rarely had the opportunity to interact with in my day-to-day life.

When I’d worked at ENT, there had been a very clear hierarchy, and the junior assistants – my role – had been the absolute bottom, which more often than not meant that I was below notice. Couple that with my limited grasp of Korean and I had been barely a step above invisible.

Here, tossed together in the moving behemoth of the tour, I came to know which engineers were useless before their morning coffee, which stylists could sleep standing upright, which managers seemed to know everything about everyone at all times, and who was hooking up with who – although that was never as secret as the couple thought it was. I came to know the habits of people I otherwise would never have known.

There were periods of time where everything was a frantic cacophony of tasks and movement, and there were other periods where simply nothing happened for vast swathes of time.

My suitcase was never unpacked, my laptop was always on standby, and the days began to merge in a way that felt somehow monotonous and varied at the same time. I constantly had to remind myself that we were barely a month in.