The Week Before

The month of March passed quickly with March break and the Permission to Dance concerts in Seoul. I even got the chance to see the movie theatre streaming of the Seoul concert which was like a fun warm up for the in-person concert ahead. The audience in our show were screaming and singing as if it were a real concert which made it so much more enjoyable.

April had approached sooner than I expected. I pushed through the first few weeks of April, trying to complete all the school work I had. Then finally, the week before had arrived. Under normal circumstances, by this time I would have been over the moon excited.

However, there was one thing that was holding both my mom and I back. In order to enter America, we needed a negative COVID-19 test taken a day before we left. When booking the trip, we had high hopes that America would remove the rule. After all, Canada had recently removed the mandate, so we thought America would do the same. It was two weeks before the trip and there was no word about the removal of the rule. Cases in Canada were rising as mask mandates had been removed. So, just to be safe, my mom decided to pull both my brother and I out of school for the entire week before the trip.

Even though we were somewhat settled because we were all staying home, there was still a lingering sense of fear. Regardless of us being out of school, I still had work to do and we still had places to go. On the Monday before, I had to get my braces off which thoroughly stressed me out as my mask would be off. After we had lost so many opportunities, I was so worried that this would be taken too. There were times when my mom and I were so stressed that you could see it in our eyes. If I wasn’t stressed, my mom was stressed. We were overthinking way too much and making ourselves feel symptoms that weren’t really there. At the slightest sneeze, we became absolutely sick with paranoia. We were basically going quarantine stir-crazy because we really wanted to go on this trip! After so many tears, Thursday came and we finally did our test. We stood outside of Shoppers Drug Mart in high winds and waited in the car for 15 minutes before we finally got our results back… Thankfully, they were negative. Just like that, the excitement started to set in…

The bags were packed, the tests were negative and it was finally going to happen. I was seeing BTS… In two days…