After Effects

Chapter 1. - Welcome to Barcelona

I was sitting at the airport. Noise canceling headphones covered my ears so all the voices, yelling, running, alarms, suitcases rolling around faded into background noise. It almost became white noise. I sat on the floor in between Jure's legs, rocking back and forth in lotus position. I needed constant stimulation to remain calm in a stressful environment, such as airports or train stations or grocery stores or just pretty much anywhere outside of our studio or homes. However it needed to be physical stimulation not noise stimulation. It honestly made traveling a living hell because everything was always so loud and in a hurry, yet when you're actually in the transportation vehicle it's soft and nice to sit in with fur seats designed to hide how dirty they actually were. Also any kind of tranportation had way too little room for much movement and stimulation.

The boys were sitting in a long row on chairs here at the waiting area as we all waited for permission to board the plane.

We were going to the first Eurovision pre-party which was held in Barcelona, Spain. It was really exciting. After almost 7 years of Joker Out we were finally going to the biggest song contest in all of Europe.

Eurovision.

Going to Eurovision was a dream of it's own of ours - and by 'ours' i mean of Joker Out's and the boys - but if we could make it past the semi-finals and to the finale we would know we had achieved something big. It's been 4 years since last time Slovenia made it to the finale, so if we could stop that record and have an actual chance of winning, Slovenia would be pretty proud of us.
After all that was why we were here. To represent our country and make Slovenia proud. Maybe even make our blood proud. Kris, Bojan and I weren't full-blood Slovenian. Kris was half Dutch from his mothers side and i was technally Danish. Bojan's ethnicity was complicated though. Not even I could follow along with all those nationalities in his blood. It's pretty cool though because Bojan could speak Serbian (along with 3 other languages), which has actually ended up giving the band 2 whole songs in Serbian. Apparently his grandma didn't speak Slovenian so he wrote 2 songs in Serbian so she could understand her grandsons music. It's really sweet if you ask me.

"16.30 plane to Barcelona opens for boarding now. Everyone in group 1 please get in line so we can start boarding the plane." A women over the speakers spoke.

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The plane was alright. 4 hours wasn't that bad. It was much worse when I had to fly from Denmark to Slovenia. Not because of the flying itself, but because the plane was delayed 5 hours. 

At 10 years old I moved from Denmark to Slovenia because my dad got a promotion that offered a whole lot better salary. So we moved. I went to an english speaking school until I learned the Slovenian language. There i would have 2 Slovene classes a day to learn the language faster. At 13 i spoke the language almost fluently, as well as english since i needed to use it so much. When i could speak and understand the language to a certain degreee i transferred to a normal school. There I met Kris. He had this really awful haircut back then and he wasn't even nearly as tall as he is now but he was still my best friend. He still was to this day. Out of the whole band we're the ones who go back the furthest. Telling the truth, it's a bit weird to think about. I don't even remember half of the stuff we've done together but we grew up together, became musicians together, joined a band together and now we're going to Eurovision together. It felt like a dream. So surreal.

Since we were young Kris has wanted to go to Eurovision. He's pretty much been a Eurovision-lover his whole life. Kris had always been more into it than me but we would have sleepovers and watch it together. Seeing him all hyped up about the competition every year was a wonderful sight.