Work Text:
What is youth?
What was it?
How was it shown to you? How do you remember it?
To me, it felt like liberation. It felt like hope for what had yet to be discovered and wishing for something new, different, more, always.
It felt like confusion also. Don't get me wrong, my body and mind were moulding and changing in ways I could barely understand. No one seemed to understand me, not even myself. It felt like isolation, separation, anxiety over what others thought of me, what I was thinking. Was there something wrong with me?
Nonetheless, the wonder that came with it was unique, irreplicable and innate. Like a moth to a dim flame, like a lantern's reflection off the wrippling water of a quiet lake. So real, but surreal. Irreplicable. Innate.
I'm sat here at 1am, barely freshly nineteen, twenty hanging on by a thread, threatening to fall into the melting pot of yet another year added onto my life, thinking to myself about the youth I had. The youth I miss. The youth I arguably may still be living in.
I remember the days I first came across BTS, the days when I was most uncomfortable, most anxious, most disgusted in my own body. They had come into my life and truly swept me off my own feet. February 2018, one week before the birth of my youngest brother. DNA MV. The images sit deep in my mind even today.
I'd truly never seen anything like it before. Never heard it. Never felt it. Life flipped upside down after that, or should I say the right way up?
Their message, their beauty, their fandom, the joy that it curated and produced, there was truly nothing better for eleven year old me. Even then, five years after BTS's debut, I managed to feel unfulfilled. I ended up feeling as if I'd been carelessly missing a piece to the puzzle of my life that was truly a few clicks and a button away from being solved. The love I had for them was deep and rich, like fine wine that had sat in its cellar for a century, only becoming deeper, more complex. I told myself time and time again, why didn't I find them before? What have I missed out on enjoying all these years? Why do I choose to fall in love now?
For days, weeks, months, I'd thought like that. I sometimes still do, but it was the music that truly kept me grounded.
A song I've been reminiscing about the most has been Euphoria. At that time, Love Yourself: Wonder was a rumour. I lived off of YouTube and ARMY Amino solely. When the song had dropped, the feeling was something so surreal. The only feeling I could link it to back then was pure happiness and joy. Much like that song's title, it felt euphoric.
The past few weeks I've been in a sort of "mid life crisis" mindset where I've felt like I've done nothing with my life and all the childish fantasies of becoming famous or some major singer songwriter had long shattered, yet come back to haunt me in a suffocating sort of way. It took me a while to get over, I must say. Every little thing was a trigger for me. Until I left the mindset and was fine for a day, and then I began singing one of my favourite BTS songs to myself in the shower.
Butterfly. I know it verbatim.
Upon near eight years of studying Korean alongside memorising English lyrics, everything began resonating. Each word had full meaning and context. A lump grew in my throat and my chest felt heavy, heavier than it had been feeling for the past month. I tried to think of other songs: Crystal Snow, RUN, Your Eyes Tell, So What, I NEED U. All of them stung in my throat and screamed "Youth is never coming back" in three different languages.
I began to feel light headed as I croaked out the few lyrics I could remember for each, clearly not wanting to be saved from the spiral I was so rapidly falling into.
And then Euphoria played in my head. These lyrics I know verbatim, both English and Korean. I can't count how many times I'd sung it in my life, but lord did it feel different to how it used to feel.
This one whispered in a broken yet matured voice, confident in cadence but dwindled of hope, aspiration and wonder. It was in those moments of recalling the song that seemed to play so obnoxiously in my head that it drowned out the background noise of water dripping from the shower head and the low hum of the bathroom fan, the wind outside and the birds in the trees. It echoed in my head the way those "8D" versions of that very song and many others would echo on repeat through my wired earphones at 1am despite the fact I should've been sleeping in time to get up for school the next morning. I missed that quiet rebellion and the comfort that comes with not knowing you are the only version of yourself that can and will ever experience that specific feeling ever again, and the naive hope to feel that feeling again and again for the rest of your life.
Truly nothing could compare. Nothing can, nothing has and I'm afraid to say nothing ever will. No matter how far I search for those feelings, those moments of ridiculous infatuation, something that sparks wonder, inspired hope and ambition, it never really comes.
And I think that's what hurts the most. Not just the looking back, missing the times and wishing you could relive them, but the sheer fact that time never allows it to be that you can feel those exact feelings ever again and, at least in my case, even when you get close, something in you pushes it away.
I think that's what youth is about though, those moments of irrational but irreplicable euphoria and the surreality of experiencing just those feelings in the here and now. Never to be felt again but always to be remembered and reminisced over. Some may call it cruel, others may call it the nature of time. Nostalgia wouldn't exist if we weren't supposed to feel it, neither would love, hate, anxiety, fear, shame, disgust, excitement, hope, wonder nor euphoria.