I will never see Britney Spears. There, I’ve admitted it—a painful truth I’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to accept. I will never see her lip-sync “If U Seek Amy” and I will never see her listlessly spin around to “I Wanna Go.” I had that opportunity in my grasp, but I let it slip away.

When I was 19, I made a plan to go on a big Belgian adventure with my then boyfriend and some of our friends. This boyfriend sucked in innumerable ways: he was a perennial killjoy, an adult who threw temper tantrums and a tasteless faux-artist who thought recorded music peaked with “The Night We Met” by Lord Huron, one of the dreariest songs known to man.

As we were booking flights for the trip, one of my friends made an incredible discovery: Britney Spears would be performing in Paris during our stay, and floor seats were going for a mere 50 euros. We were all queer people born the same year “… Baby One More Time” was released, so we began to jitter with excitement. All of us, of course, except my boyfriend, who stewed silently in the corner, as was his habit when others felt joy.

After the crowd dispersed, he told me he didn’t want to go to the concert, and that he would never forgive me if I went because if I went then he’d feel pressured to spend money and time on something he didn’t want to do, and it was manipulative and, frankly, abusive of me to even consider doing something he wasn’t interested in, and even though everybody else was going to see the only Britney Spears there will ever be in the greatest city on Earth for a negligible amount of money, I would be the devil incarnate if I went. So I didn’t.

Later, in Europe, the day of the Britney concert came and my friends travelled from our place in Brussels to Paris. Determined to enjoy the day and distract myself from my profound grief, I organized a day trip for my boyfriend and I to Cologne, Germany.

Early in the morning, we caught the bus from Brussels and wound up in West Germany’s Gothic mecca. We spent the day observing basilicas and downing radlers. I successfully anticipated and neutralized most of his mood swings, resulting in a somewhat peaceful, if boring, day. At its end, we went to the station to catch the last bus to Belgium.

The burly olive-skinned driver demanded our passports in a gruff German accent. We had left them at home, naively assuming they wouldn’t be necessary in the freewheeling Schengen Area that unites the two countries. The driver wasn’t having it, and refused us entry onto the bus, denying the scans of our passports we’d saved to our phones. We went back into the bus station, resigned to spending the night there. Thunder crackled outside, and a horrific torrent of rain began to spill out of the sky. My boyfriend began to stew, then berated me for forgetting our passports, as if the fault were all mine.

I was stranded in a foreign country with a hostile and unstable bisexual dead set on making me miserable. Five hundred kilometres away, Britney Spears was entering the stage of some fog-filled Paris arena. I could practically smell the poppers tormenting me from the other side of the freeway.

We called our friend’s parents, whom we were staying with in Brussels. Reluctantly, miraculously, they offered to pick us up. We ordered a 50-euro cab to transport us to the western-most part of town so they wouldn’t have to drive in the city. We ended up in the suburbs, sitting pathetically on some German’s driveway, drenched with rain. By the time the parents mercifully pulled up, I had taken a hard look at what life with him would be like, and it looked a lot like crying in the rain on the German pavement while my friends partied in France. I didn’t like the view.

I thought I’d never see Rosalía. I’ve been a major fan of the Catalan pop princess since her 2017 debut album Los Ángeles imploded my idea of what music could sound like. My early investment in her has paid dividends; she has only refined her one-of-a-kind mélange of classical music and cutting-edge pop since then, making her one of the world’s most celebrated and successful artists.

In the summer of 2022, her Motomami record was all me and my friends would listen to. I have a vivid memory of my roommate and I doing shrooms in our apartment on the day of its release, lying on the carpet and basking in the euphoric vocals of “Sakura” and the off-kilter reggaeton of “Saoko.” It soundtracked beach days and nights in; we danced to house remixes of “Chicken Teriyaki” and sang “Hentai” at karaoke together. I look back on that summer as one of the most carefree and liberated times of my life. Rosalía’s music was the perfect companion.

That summer was also the most blissful era of a different romantic relationship that lasted several years. He eclipsed my other boyfriend in almost every way, and possessed a lackadaisical joie de vivre my ex couldn’t dream of. One quality they shared, however, was a certain hard-headedness about what was fun, and a stubborn resistance to doing anything other than what they wanted to do, when they wanted to do it. This attitude rubbed against my inability to assert myself in the same way, and I generally tailed my boyfriend around, trying to enjoy his idea of fun. For my new boyfriend, fun meant partying, hard and fast and late into the night.

When Rosalía announced a summer tour to promote Motomami, I was desperate to go. My roommate invited me to join him, so I asked my boyfriend to come. He said no—he wanted to go to a new fancy rave happening the same night at Rosalía’s Toronto date. He didn’t say I couldn’t go to the concert, but I felt torn between the concert I’d been dreaming of and the man I thought would last—plus I was too broke to afford both events. In the end, I chose him.

He did not last, but I’ve now spent four years hearing about how the Motomami tour was earth-shattering, life-changing, star-making. I swore I wouldn’t miss my chance again.

When I met my current partner, I had the distinct privilege of showing him Rosalía’s music for the first time. We started dating around the time “Berghain,” the throttling lead single off her latest masterwork, Lux, came out. The song, which features alternative provocateurs Björk and Yves Tumor trading verses with Rosalía in German, Spanish and English, seemed to light up some previously undiscovered node in my sweet boyfriend’s brain. He became obsessed with Rosalía, and memorized (at least the phonetics of) Lux, which is sung in 13 different languages.

Lux is Rosalía’s best effort yet. Her music has always scraped at heaven; her mission as an artist is to locate divinity in music, history, sex and art. Her latest album comes about as close to that as any pop star ever has.

I did not have to convince him to attend the Lux tour with me. When she announced the dates, it was a foregone conclusion that we would go together. I believe that love is best fostered in art shared between partners, and Lux, more than any movie we’ve seen or playlist we’ve co-curated, has been an enduring force of connection between us. We have revelled in uncovering its thousand secrets and rejoiced in the sublime beauty of her multilingual poetry.

It is vulnerable to show someone I love something I cherish. Art means everything to me; it’s the prism through which I understand my life. If someone I care about dismisses or discards an album that means a lot to me, it can feel like a personal affront, but I’m often so grateful to have love at all that I swallow the hurt and let it fester. Watching my boyfriend snatch up Lux and take it in as his own mended an old swollen wound in me.

We wore complementary black outfits to the concert, invoking a similar sort of sexy priest vibe we thought appropriate for the evening. When Rosalía emerged on stage, her plume of dark hair billowing behind her, my boyfriend began to cry, and I’m not sure he stopped till the lights came up two hours later. The show was magnificent; its elegant choreography and intricate sets gave off a delicate, golden glow, as if God Himself had sanctified the stage. As Rosalía sang, an English translation of the lyrics appeared above the stage like an opera performance, bold white letters ensconced on a black background.

During her performance of “La Yugular,” my favourite song off Lux, Rosalía ascended an ivory staircase, placed her microphone on the ground and sang into the floor about an utter devotion to her lover, or to God, or to some heavenly fusion of the two. Her passion entranced me, but for a brief moment my concentration broke and I glanced at the translation of what she was howling into the ground. “For you, I would destroy the sky,” it read. “For you, I would tear down hell.” I looked at my boyfriend, and he looked at her, tears staining his cheeks. At last, I understood what she meant.