This Is the One Thing We Didn’t Want to Happen (notes from End of the Road Festival)

We arrived like pilgrims with plastic ponchos,
trading spreadsheets for mushrooms and sleep-deprivation,
hoping to lose ourselves between the trees
and maybe find something louder than our lives.

By Friday, the woods were singing.
Goat set the sky on fire—
masks on, minds off,
a ritual in distortion and holy noise.

We danced like summoned things,
like the stage was an altar,
like praying was a given.

Later, Sylvie Kreusch floated onstage
like a spell in silk—
half Kate Bush, half séance.
She sang and the air changed its shape.
I forgot my name,
but remembered every person I’d ever loved.

Someone yelled,
“This is the one thing we didn’t want to happen!”
and the sky broke,
and the tents collapsed,
and everyone laughed like it was scripted.
Perhaps it was.

We stumbled into a quiz by mistake—
2 grams deep and full of hubris.
Every answer, no matter the question:
“Roy Orbison.”
A performance art piece.
A disaster.
A moment of joy so dumb it felt divine.

A boy played cello in the folly, and
someone gave me an e for free.
I watched a band I’d never heard of
play the soundtrack to my future breakdown.
Five stars. Would definitely cry again.

The nights were velvet chaos—
lanterns and dope smoke,
a quiet woman painting planets on strangers’ faces
while a techno remix of SOS played somewhere deep in the distance.

When it ended, it didn’t.
We carried it home in our hair,
in the ache of leaving
in the way we now look at strangers
like they may also have been there,
beneath the fairy lights,
watching the world fall apart and then coalesce
ceremoniously.

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