In Boraland We Trust

The post came through on a Sunday morning, still early enough that the house was quiet. A girl in Texas was asking all of ARMY to help her find the stranger she’d sat next to at BTS Vegas, Day 3. Section 135C, Row 29, Seats 10 and 11. The stranger was from somewhere near Stanford. She had printed a keychain for herself. Orange, shaped like a cloud, the words C’MON WINGS stamped across it. She gave it away without hesitation when she had nothing else to offer.

I replied saying it might be my cousin. Tagged her. It wasn’t.

Earlier that same month, at an adoption conference in Hyde Park, I sat down at a lunch table next to two women I had never met. The seats were assigned by nothing other than proximity. Somewhere in the middle of the meal, I mentioned BTS. One of them looked up. The other one said “Wait.”

We were three strangers who had come to the same conference for the same reason and had ended up sitting next to each other by accident. We were also all ARMY.

For the next twenty minutes, we fangirled as women who have had to defend this love to people who do not understand it and are tired of defending it and have simply stopped. We compared when we became ARMY, which album cracked us open, which member we cannot explain to anyone outside the fandom. We exchanged numbers. Followed each other on every platform. Made plans to find each other on August 1st at MetLife for the Arirang concert.

Chithra was there. She captured us on video, three women at a lunch table, the delight visible from across the room.

The drawer in my study holds photocards, CDs I will never play, posters still in their original packaging. Two sets of BTS dolls, one for the Golu, one for my desk, because I wanted them near me when I write. I am on the masthead of a literary webzine called Litnamjooning, named for our muse, for the poet of the group who keeps telling us to slow down and pay attention to the world that is, which is itself a miracle. We take him at his word. We stop to smell the roses, literally and otherwise. We write about it.

It is also where a novel came from. A Star Keeps Its Distance follows a music writer who was sent to cover a group she did not choose, and finds the belonging she had stopped letting herself ask for.

A month before Hyde Park, a Threads mutual named Rujuta and I stumbled into a conversation about the NJ concerts. Before it ended, I had invited her to come stay with me. A stranger. I did not hesitate.

I have been a Swiftie. I know what being part of a fandom feels like. Taylor Swift’s fandom is enormous and devoted and capable of extraordinary things. But ARMY has something I have not found elsewhere: people who chose to love a group of goofy, billionaire men who are rooted so deeply to where they came from that the rootedness itself became part of the music. Men who cry in public and are unapologetic about it. Who speak about the weight of being famous with the vocabulary of therapy. Who told their fandom to take care of themselves, to rest, when going out on tour again would have been financially rational.

The fans who stayed came for the music and found something they hadn’t been offered elsewhere. Acceptance.

K-pop comes with judgment. To find someone wearing their ARMY card loudly and openly is a beautiful thing. It says: you are not the only person here who chose this impractical, exact path. We have stopped explaining it to people who want us to.

I see you. I am with you.

Somewhere near Stanford, I imagine, a woman is printing another orange keychain. C’MON WINGS. She already knows it belongs to someone she hasn’t met yet.

If this moved you, send a tip.