It’s truly the end of an era. And I am here searching for words, trying to make sense of nostalgia and longing for a time long gone that’s now over with a heavy-hitting finality I don’t want to accept, and yet tomorrow it will be fine.
But today, today, I write this post to remember the feeling of sheer joy of logging on every day, finding new things to scream about, and complain about, and argue about, and then scrolling back to read my friends do all those things and more, and enjoy the feeling of a fandom community, that I don’t think I will ever experience again in this same way.
It’s weird to thank people I never met to for what they did for me, but I am thankful to Arashi for the music, that I still come back to from time to time, and I am especially thankful to Arashi for the fandom community, for the people I met and friends I made, who all were here because of them. I hope you’re all doing well wherever you are right now and that we meet again in some other fandom, at some other time.
I loved the concert. I cried at the end. I still understand about three sentences in Japanese, so I will have to hunt down translations at some point, BUT I am so happy that the stars (and YouTube algorithm, lbr) aligned for me to buy the ticket and watch Arashi live for the very first time, and also the very last.
There are a lot of things I have been wrong about, but one thing is especially funny in retrospect. I always thought that being a fan of Arashi has an expiration date, and that at some point in life I will stop. And yet here I am, 17 years later, still an Arashi fan, and I doubt this will ever change.
