Somewhere past the last Los Angeles exit, without announcement or ceremony, the city just disappears. The density thins. The billboards space themselves out. Suddenly, there is nothing but desert: flat, bone-white and ancient. It stretches in every direction, as if it has waited patiently for you. The sky doubles in size. The air changes quality. Somewhere in that wide, sun-bleached corridor between Los Angeles and Indio, with the music pulsing through the car floor and into your feet, Coachella stops feeling like a trip you planned. It starts to feel like something you are truly falling into, something that has been pulling you toward it for longer than you realized.
I bought my ticket seven months prior, during the Amex presale. I was alone in my apartment on a Tuesday in October. I did not have a ride, a place to stay or a single person confirmed to come with me. Growing up in New York, Coachella was always at a cultural distance. It was the kind of event that gathers years of expectation before you get close. My ideas of it came from livestreams, other people’s Instagram stories and the gravity of wanting something without saying so. I watched from afar so long that continuing to observe became uncomfortable. One day, I simply opened the presale page and bought a ticket before I could overthink it.
Planning took about three weeks and included a level of chaos I was not prepared for. After the original group dissolved, a new one slowly came together through three simultaneous group chats. Friends joined and left as plans shifted. The process was disorderly, loud and constantly changing, always on the verge of collapse but somehow holding together. Airbnb listings disappeared while we were reading them. Prices climbed the moment we paused. We eventually locked a house in Indio for 10 people at $875 each, 20 minutes from the polo fields. Confirming the booking was proof that things would be okay.
We arrived in the early evening, and half the lineup had already played before we even found the entrance. By the time we got to the General Admission gates and trekked the mile of sand, the Coachella Stage, Mojave and Outdoor Theatre were all mid-set. The festival map on our phones was soon proven optimistic. Its tidy layout fell apart amid stretches of heat and crowds. In 10 minutes, sand filled our shoes and stayed for the rest of the festival; we dashed between sets, miscalculated timetables and learned the layout through real-time mistakes.
Then Sabrina Carpenter walked out onto the Coachella Stage on the first night, and something about the whole day shifted.
She performed. That sounds obvious, but it isn’t. There is a clear difference between an artist who stands on a stage and one who inhabits it. The latter makes the space contract until the crowd no longer sees it as an outdoor festival but something far more immediate. Carpenter moved through her set with a delicacy and warmth that felt almost architectural. It was as if she knew the frequency that would turn 50,000 tired, overheated strangers into something else. By the end, the people around me seemed changed compared to an hour before. That is not a small thing for a performance to achieve.
On day two, we arrived early for Justin Bieber and secured a front spot. The group behind us pressed in. When one reached out and touched my friend’s hair, nearby strangers shifted, their bodies subtly forming a wall around us. This silent coordination became one of the weekend’s vivid memories; an impromptu alliance built in seconds.
Later that night, Bieber headlined. The crowd released everything it had saved into the first seconds of recognition. He played snippets of his old YouTube songs, a workaround for the situation with his masters that most accept as an explanation. He was there. He was pleasant. Carpenter had performed the night before, and that comparison did quite a bit of damage all evening. The Strokes played elsewhere and sounded immaculately, almost defiantly, like themselves. Depending on your feelings about a certain strain of 2001 New York guitar music, this is comforting, like a song you know by heart but haven’t played in years. Out in the desert, it just felt right.
Day three arrived with a noticeably different energy: things felt looser, stranger and less concerned with putting on a show for anyone or chasing that perfect Instagram moment. As the group collectively relaxed, the mood changed from striving for a carefully curated experience to simply appreciating what was in front of us. That evening, Major Lazer played the Coachella Stage and it seemed as though the whole weekend had quietly built toward this set. When “Lean On” came on, a song from 2015 that I have listened to more times than I will admit to anyone, something released in the crowd; a collective exhale moved through the field all at once. As night deepened, Young Thug took the stage and the grounds transformed again, filled with a kind of energy that only emerges after dark, when the festival stops feeling like a scheduled event and starts to feel endless, like something you are simply inside.
What follows the music each night is unexpected. As the music stopped, tens of thousands turned from the stages and moved toward the exits at once; a vast human tide pushing through the darkness, into dust kicked up by every footstep and held in the thick air. Phone flashlights swung amid the haze. People moved forward with a specific momentum, glazed from standing for nine hours, their bodies seeming to understand before their minds. The scene resembled the opening of a film where something subtle and irrevocable has gone wrong: everyone moving the same way through dust and darkness, eyes forward, silent. This silence was full rather than uncomfortable, and strangely beautiful. Getting home was its own struggle. The first night, Wi-Fi failed for over 125,000 people. Uber existed only on a three-hour delay, so not really at all. Reality was locals charging $500 for rides that normally cost $12, and we had no room to negotiate. They knew. The second night, after saving a driver’s number and arranging a pickup, we felt we’d solved it. He did not show. We waited an hour in the lot. By night three, we let go of expectation and learned that complete absence of hope was, in practice, a reasonable strategy.
The best exit strategy: pre-book a pickup to the designated lot at least two hours ahead, set a physical meeting spot before entering because phones die and bring a backup charger. The desert isn’t friendly to electronics or lost friends.
I had a VIP pass and used it exactly once, on day three, for about 15 minutes alone, because my friends had GA and I was not going to leave them for cleaner bathrooms and a $30 matcha that tasted like defeat. The Rose Garden was genuinely beautiful, but not worth leaving my friends for.
The cold arrived each night around 10 p.m., predictably. Despite this, few believed in its severity until it was palpably present. On the first night, we purchased thermals from a stand and wore them throughout the weekend, layering them over our clothes and adopting an unconventional yet effective style. Throughout the venue, lemonade stands provided refreshment and lived up to their widespread presence. Similarly, the cookie monster ice cream proved as enjoyable as advertised. Even weeks after the festival, sand continued to appear in my belongings, as a lingering reminder of the experience.
The version of Coachella I had built in my head over years of watching from New York, from livestreams and accumulated mythology, turned out to be both grander and smaller than the real thing in ways I could have never predicted. What I can say is that the real experience gave me things the imagined one never could have, because the imagined one was smooth, curated and made narrative sense. The real one was more human. Being part of moments like strangers forming a wall without a word, a 2015 song dropping in the dark and something in me just letting go during the festival made me reevaluate what it means to participate, rather than merely observe. The walk out through the dust every night, all of us moving through the same haze toward the same nowhere, tired and a slightly wrecked and completely unable to explain what we had just been part of, revealed the profound unpredictability that defines authentic experience. That inexplicability is the whole thing. It’s what you’re actually paying for, even when you don’t know it yet, even when you’re standing in the middle of it and still trying to decide if it’s worth it. It is. Unreservedly, logistically painfully, it is.
