Day Twenty-Five

I love these No Strings costumes. I love the entire opening of the No Strings tour - when they remove the last of the wrist attachments, sing you don't have to be afraid to fall in love, and then soar into the air again with the nifty sound effect and I swear my breath caught and all the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

Come Back New by Velma (with thanks to patchworkdragon for pointing the way)

JC loses his way somehow, sometime between LA the first and LA the second. It isn't intentional, it's no one's fault, but it happens.

And he's miserable as a result. Pop Odyssey is his own personal hell, his descent into Dante's Inferno. At night, after shows, he crawls onto buses or into hotel rooms, his back to the others, and sleeps. Sleeps and sleeps and tries to shut the world out. He's lost.

I think about it sometimes, how *NSYNC was never really any of the boys' ultimate goal. Like, the group was never not so much the end of the line, but the say-all, end-all aspiration of any of their lives. Lise suggested it first in Dancing Days, and this story just made me ache for JC all that much more, because if that is what he wanted, he doesn't ever have a chance at it now, not in the pure way the experience should be.