As of tomorrow, it will have been one month since this day, if that’s any indication of how quickly I work and process things. (It is.)

I have no excuse for going, really; I just went to see Julien Baker. And Snail Mail, maybe. And Bon Iver is always really good live, anyway. Even if I had to stand on my tiptoes and angle my head just right to see “him.” When you close your eyes, it almost seems just as nice.

Laura and Tiffany found cheap ticket resales on GumTree, and what was meant to be a rather sad solitary festival day for me turned out to be quite a nice one that ended in a leisurely walk home from the park and some frozen pizza that annoyingly kept setting off the fire alarm in the middle of a weeknight. (Sorry, neighbours.)

I’ve often thought about these sorts of things as harbingers of a weird kind of solitude. I am often marooned in a sea of people, but I am, at the end of it, alone. And, truthfully, I haven’t been to go to a festival (or gigs, really) with other people, in a while. You lose them at some point during the day, and that first time that I found myself to be by myself, it took a while for me to stop craning my neck to see just where my friends had gone off to.

It’s easier to just focus on what I’m watching now. Maybe it’s a sign of a letting go of a specific sort of anxiety. Maybe it’s just a decline in the level of caring. In any case, I’ve learned now how to think past and beyond the things that worry me and try to focus on what makes a perfect day a perfect day.