BREAKING UP WITH YOUR FAVORITE BAND

BY MADISON PEARSON

After that show, I realized that there was no replacing Panic!. If I could’ve popped the question, I would’ve. From that moment on, they were the one.

Our understanding of one another was at its strongest, I’d never felt so heard or accepted. I was committed. There was nothing complicated about it. Plainly and simply, life with them was far superior to a life without them. We were inseparable — you couldn’t mention one of us without mentioning the other. We were a package deal, and I was totally OK with that. It was a musical soulmate connection.

As I grew, the band grew with me. We evolved and changed at the same pace. Everything was smooth sailing through high school. Panic! photos hung in my locker. I was always waiting for the next adventure that we would go on together. A new musical sound? A television appearance? A festival date? (And I still doodled their name in my notebooks.)

Admittedly, it was somewhat of a long-distance relationship. But that couldn’t keep us apart. I traveled across the country to support my love, attending at least 10 concerts over the years. I aided in the creation of fan projects, like cutting and handing out thousands of paper rainbow-colored hearts to hold up during “Girls / Girls / Boys” during a show in Boise. Heck, I even went to one-off shows by Panic! member Ryan Ross after he left the band in 2009. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to show my devotion to my dearest Disco boys.

But soon after I set off to college in 2018, something shifted. I was exploring my newfound freedom when suddenly, my future looked very different from what I’d originally imagined while doodling in junior high notebooks. Maybe I was worn out from the chaos of that decade of intense tween/teen passion. Maybe I was just maturing. But something felt different.