I thought I missed festivals, turns out I just miss my friends
By Vici Barrera
I’m not sure how it is outside Mexico, but by January there are already a bunch of lineups for the music festivals that take place during the year. In my last two years of college, my group of friends, who I have known since we were 12, and I, decided to go to the same festival together. So by the beginning of the year, I was already saving money preparing for the next, even if that specific line up was not out yet.
Obviously, the way January 2021 is going so far, there won’t be a next one.
The last festival I went to was the 2019 Corona Capital. It takes place in November and it’s a big, if not the biggest, pop-indie music festival in Mexico. It was actually its 10th anniversary and they brought out very nostalgic music acts because of it. The Strokes, Two Door Cinema Club, Bloc Party, Broken Social Scene, Cat Power and Sharon Van Etten were only some of them. It was a dream for the indie-alternative kids that loved these new classics, but also for the young adults like me, who were fulfilling the dream of their teenage selves.
It also had newer acts: Years and Years, Snail Mail, Phantogram, The Japanese House, Blossoms, The Voidz, Sales and many others. Oh and of course, it also had the young headliner, Billie Eilish.
Me and my friends screamed, danced, ate, sang at the top of our lungs and took pretty pictures. I enjoyed that last festival weekend a lot, probably even more than I enjoyed my graduation party. So a year later, in November of 2020 I was a nostalgic mess, looking at all my Instagram memories from last year and the year before that.
All the bands, the singers and performers giving their all, the screaming, the crowds, the outfits, the energy, the overpriced foods and merch, the funny moments with my friends while we waited for the sets to start, the Instagram worthy content but the wholesome feeling concerts gave me. I wished so bad I could go to one. As much as there were far worse things happening in the world that I could have felt sorry about, all I could think of for a few days was that I wouldn’t be seeing anyone live for a long long time.
I watched the sets of a few acts on YouTube longingly. I even looked at Pinterest pics of concerts, watched clips that my own friends reposted on their Instagram stories and I pitied myself and the world.
It wasn’t until I was reflecting about everything to set up my new years journal the first days of January, that I went back again for my memories on Instagram, but also on the old phone where I had them all stored.
I heard myself crying of laughter when my friend P tried to “tattoo” us with a black pen but he ended up spilling the ink on my best friends' leg, and we had to cover her in toilet paper so it wouldn’t stain the white sheets of our hotel beds. There was another video of later that night, when we all had a huge fight and my best friend Vee and I had to literally drag P through the hotel hallways while he drunkenly recorded himself complaining about life.
The clips of our night out also made me smile. We wandered on Coyoacán buying tacos, margaritas, mojitos and posed for some random couple who took a polaroid picture of us that they overcharged us for.
And I also looked at the year before; the 2018 archive. That was our first festival together and probably the most exciting one because of that. I remember on our way there I sat next to my friend Liz and we talked to each other about our misfortunes in the love department for probably six hours.
I observed with nostalgia the pictures of the pink sky that I made my Aries friend take while we waited to see The Neighbourhood. It was the first time I wasn’t front row in a crowd so large, so I pretty much felt like I was drowning. Luckily the Aries is 6 foot 4 tall, and he was right behind me, holding me and letting me use him as my backrest. He constantly asked if I was okay and if I could breathe, and we both shouted curses at people who kept pushing trying to sneak into a closer view of the stage.
There’s also a couple of videos where all of us are dancing and singing to “Young, Dumb and Broke” during Khalid’s set, and we look exactly like that description.
A picture of the big screen with a visual that said “JOY DIVISION” reminded me when I held hands with Liz and the Aries while we ran off to see New Order live. I had teary eyes while we stood there and they played “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.
And as I kept scrolling, I realised that as much as I do miss festivals and concerts for the music, they definitely would have been different without my friends.
Yes, listening to Lorde sing all her Melodrama hits was a religious experience, but it was also during that concert that I saw and hugged my best friend Vee for the first time in almost two years. She had left to be an au pair in early 2017 and she made it all work out to be back on time for that festival, and found me exactly at that set.
And yes, I was incredibly excited to see Julian Casablancas for the first time in my life, but I wouldn’t have been the same if I was there watching him alone rather than with my friend P who was the only one who also wanted to see The Strokes and that laughed when I screamed like an excited 5 year old everytime the man talked. We both laughed when we realised Julian was either extremely drunk, or high and he kept talking nonsense. We weren’t even mad when their set ended early.
The Kooks were also incredible, I wasn't as excited as all my friends to watch them but God, it was a great decision. The memory of the crowd and my friends next to me smiling while everyone sang “Seaside”, still gives me chills.
I could go on and on, though the memories didn’t stop when the concerts did. Since our city is 12 hours away from Mexico City, the whole ride there is filled with funny stories, with deep secrets of each other's families, our thoughts on the after life. Aries and I sat together and he would put on music and share an earphone with me. P and I would sit together and he talked about his problems with girls. Johana and I sat together and looked at pictures to choose the best.
That is what I actually miss. I miss our deep talks, our improvised trivias on The Simpsons to pass time, I miss sharing hotel beds, I miss having breakfast together and fighting about what to get for dinner while Johana was already in bed ignoring all of us because she didn’t care. I miss going shopping to the stores of that huge city and eating cheap street food together.
I just miss that specific time frame of days where we made space in our schedules to focus only on our festival weekend. Even if we were all in different colleges, had different jobs, different friends and lived in different parts of the city. We all got together to that one big event.
That seems so unlikely now, even with the pandemic, all our lives kept going on. Me and the Aries have office jobs, P graduated from Medicine and his life is now basically at the hospital, Vee is now enrolled in two universities online, Liz moved to Europe and is now engaged to her Italian boyfriend and Johana is pursuing her career as a dentist.
Our group chat is the only thing keeping us together and I don’t know when (or if) we’ll be able to go to make a trip together of any kind again. But I do hope that soon we can all at least hang out together, in a house, with some take out food and a boring board game that we’ll ignore after the first game because we get into deep conversations. That could be enough for me. I really just miss my friends together in real life.
Though festivals being a thing again wouldn’t hurt.