Trivialities #1
Why I can’t love K-pop anymore.
Three years of my life, rather the dopamine in my body, were characterised by impeccable smiles, colourful themed costumes, and tunes that could very well put a jive in your hip. Everyone’s heard of it, and not everyone’s a fan, but it’s all a part of the package.
But as I made one of those transitions in my life that one can’t quite choose to avoid, I found that I had no time left to smile adoringly at my broken phone screen as figures pranced around to the beats. Retrospectively, I am not quite sure if it was a lack of hours or something else that phased K-pop out of my life.
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They say life is a circle, and the same things that took away time from my hands returned it to me recently. So I went back to that old haunt in the internet, as if to check up on an old friend and wish her well. I revisited all my favourite moments, and discovered some new ones, perhaps the social media equivalent of exchanging a few teary words with a long-lost loved one. And then struck me one among the many futile dilemmas I am plagued by daily — why can I not go back to my schoolgirl times?
It was tempting to dismiss it as an age issue. As far as I can tell, it does seem to be one of those things that are meant to capture the fancy of younger people. But, depending on the context, calling myself too young for K-pop also does seem quite obnoxious, and besides, I’d come across many people who were well into their silver years who would still wave a light stick happily.
It seemed to me that the reasons were entirely different. While revisiting those old haunts no doubt brought with it immeasurable joy, it also brought back that tinge of melancholy. For you see, not only did I revisit faces of the past, I revisited a version of myself that I no longer knew or I no longer remembered entirely. Her challenges were so far displaced from mine today, and her joys constructed so differently, that her entire being was opaque to me. But of course, there’s always that slight bit of coherence just enough to sting. I knew that there was a sort of invisible barrier between those times and these. And if I did something, I would break that sacred connection.
To preserve the sanctity of those times, I have to stay away.
