A few days after my twenty-first birthday, I purchased a ticket to Urbanscapes 2018 from a stranger on Instagram. The risk of being scammed was high, but I chose to place my trust in this man more than anyone else I had in my life. Concerts were a luxury for a music fan like me, and this would be my first concert experience, despite spending countless nights writing about records that made me feel alive in the sombre, lonely college life. I prayed that the stranger was sincere, hoping he wouldn’t take advantage of a foolish girl who desperately wanted to see Wolf Alice.

My teenage years were shaped and formed by the allure of Ellie Rowsell’s soft songwriting and punchy vocals, specifically magnified in their Blush EP. Their lyrics sound like they were taken literally from the pages of my angsty, teenage diary and mish-mashed into dreamy punk music. There was something about having a female-fronted band that writes about fuckboys, girlhood and existential crises with the perfect balance of ferocity and gentleness that felt like home to me.

The wait for my ticket to be scanned felt like a loud rush. Once approved, I made my way into the Chin Woo Stadium like a kid discovering a chocolate factory for the first time. Since I went alone, I made all of the rookie mistakes as a concert first-timer, especially when I decided to stand firmly in the front row. Every time the crowd wave pushed me behind I’d dive into the front again, because I assumed the closer I am to the performers, the better my experience will be. But the point of being a rookie is to gradually grow into a professional one, and so I understood: The more you go to concerts, the more you realise front rows are nowhere close to being the best seat of the night. 

When Ellie appeared in her neon green jumpsuit, blonde rock star hair, I froze. Inside my head, there was no one else in the crowd except me, though their screams were ringing in my ears. When the band sprung into “You’re A Germ” I shouted “You ain’t going to heaven / Cause I’m dragging you down to hell” like a dead girl who was brought back to life. A guy who looked like he had matured beyond his mid-life crises and came for Wolf Alice alone stared at me. Perhaps in shock, perhaps annoyed. My hands trembled every time I attempted to record their performances, and my iPhone 7, which was jammed and nearly out of storage, struggled to keep up. That night, I spent a sleepless night, watching their performances over and over again.

Then there was Mitski in 2019. It was a deliberate decision to go alone; I had just left a tumultuous situationship that felt just as painful as an actual breakup with a long-term partner. Mitski’s existence during this period of my life felt heavily involved spiritually — I found myself in a musician who translates female longing into songwriting so miserably. Mitski reminded me of Fiona Apple, but with a heavier dose of pessimism. In “Francis Forever”, she sings: “I miss you more than anything.” To love someone in loneliness is to pour your heart out alone, I learned. So that’s what I did. 

Because I was alone, I was able to remember the tiny moments; from a guy holding his laughter watching Mitski’s theatrical dancing to me tearing a Mitski poster off the wall and folding it lightly so it wouldn’t leave creases. After the show, I sat alone, uncomfortably, by the small sidewalk, just enough to fit a girl of my size. Mitski came out of the exit door, walking into a white van. Fans were waiting and cheering for her with flowers, gifts and other things I couldn’t afford to offer her except my truest attention. 

I watched them from afar and scrolled through the videos I had recorded. Then, the lights from the white van beamed at my face. Inside the van, Mitski looked at me. She waved, with the biggest smile on her face and mouthed “Hi” like an excited little kid. I didn’t wave back; I was too stunned. 

At Tapau Fest 2019, I went alone again. I arrived just at the right time to witness a sweaty, adrenaline-rush Hyke Nasir waving kain pelikat in the air. I saw Lust, Lucy in the Loo, and Iqbal M. whose performance shifted everything I ever understood about showmanship, Mafidz, Toko Kilat, and I ended the night with Midnight Fusic. At this point, I was fluent at going to concerts alone. I’m even better at using live music as a distraction from my deteriorating love life. 

A few days before Urbanscapes 2019, I was recovering from another awful, awful heartbreak. For months, my mind had been moving in slow motion, my hunger curbed like a Tumblr tween learning about Kate Moss for the first time. Every decision I made was influenced by the heartbreak, and so was every ticket purchase. Every show I’ve been to was solely to remember and forget the heartbreak at the same time. 

On the day of Urbanscapes 2019, I left class early and jumped on the first Selangor Bus at the dusty, decaying bus stop of Ijok. I took a step inside the red, croaky bus, the thin green ticket was kept inside my pocket as a souvenir of this trip. The bus looked like it was falling apart, the passengers were either tired or daydreaming, some both at once. I wondered if their hearts were as heavy as mine. I wondered if they, too, were looking for temporary distractions from the person who made them question the point of their existence.

In the crowd, watching Sobs, my mind fizzled and unfocused. Celine Autumn was twirling on stage while waiting for “Vacation” to hit its bridge. Celine sings and dances like nobody’s watching — the appeal of Sobs is their bedroom, bubbly pop with memorable melodies. But Celine is no less than a performer with an alluring stage presence. On stage, she sways by herself through the instrumentals like a character in a feel-good movie. And I am her sole audience in the theatre, feeling otherwise.

Whenever I tell people I go to concerts alone, I get pitying looks — a slight confusion. A fleeting awkwardness starts to bubble in the air that I’m so familiar with. I met a friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in years at a festival. She said, “Kesiannya you datang sorang!” and dragged my hand to join her friend group whom I’m sure I would never fit into. Too chic, too posh. One performance after another, I started to slowly distance myself from the group, before I finally disappeared. Then we saw each other again just before the headliner hit the stage. We smiled, I would never fit in and I think she agreed. 

My fate has long decided that I’ll always be a painfully shy and awkward person. So it’s difficult for me to comprehend every time someone moans about not having a friend to go concerts to or worse, missing out on an opportunity just because you don’t have friends to go with. I understand the natural desire to not be alone in a crowded room, but admittedly, I am at my most selfish and sensitive to music — I’m not afraid to look lonely or sad, whichever you want to perceive first.

There is a Pinterest-famous quote from a Warsan Shire poem, she writes: “My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.” I get confused every time someone thinks of loneliness at a concert. Loneliness to me is the nightly heaviness that drags you down, the pause after a petty, big argument with your partner, the inevitable envy that creeps in when you realise your problem exclusively belongs to you and no one else is sharing the same pain.

But when the blue spotlight shines, the dimmed figures of musicians walking to the stage, the mic-checks that pound by your excitement, the woos of the crowd waiting for the show to start, the hecklers making jokes that I find funny because I’m easily amused — my ingrained loneliness was gone. It disappeared, sliced into invisible pieces. It separates itself from my present mind, out of respect, that it doesn’t belong at the concert. At concerts, I’m no longer a lonely girl. I’m just a living one.

And maybe because almost every show I’ve been to serves a different purpose than just entertainment. Perhaps, the intentions all along were to discard my pain behind. I would leave a piece of myself in the empty hall and bring a new home. I shed my skin in every room when the colourful confetti spread everywhere, when the mosh pits were just lonely floors calling for more humans, when people scrambled to find their friends or wiped their sweats off with their already damp t-shirts. I’m a new person now. I went home from The Bee that February never to listen to Mitski, at least not religiously, again because the prophecy has been fulfilled — I came to forget and so I did. Post-Urbanscapes 2019, I slept that night promising myself it would be over. Every pain needs to be over. And so it did.

After the pandemic resists and concerts are happening again, I’ve yet to attend big shows alone. I go with friends and family now. Maybe because I’m less miserable, maybe because I see less need to depend on music to feel alive again. But the longing to be alone is still around. It takes me back to a version of me that persists amidst despair: sitting alone at the bus stop in Ijok, clenched to my cheap earphones, my heart broke like never before while listening to Sobs, absorbing Celine’s sugary vocals into my body. I listen and I listen and I listen. Nobody could fulfil that joy except me.