I’m 20 years old and I’m shopping for Halloween costumes with my best friend somewhere in North America when I find out that Liam Payne died.
The woman at the till asks my best friend for her email, but she can’t remember how to spell her own name.
We spend the following days mourning, one of us in silence and the other in hysterics. Occasionally, we look for comfort in online videos or statements from the band. We find it only makes it hurt more.
For someone who has spent months keeping up to date with the latest details of the backlash against the singer, Liam Payne’s death hurt more than I’d expected.
I find, through posts by strangers and messages from friends, that I am not alone in this feeling. So where did this hurt come from? Where had I been storing all of these feelings?
They were seemingly nowhere to be found when I dutifully sided with women speaking out against him online in recent months, spreading their words around as if they’d personally asked me to do it.
The grief is far more complex than irrationally crying for days following the death of a man I’d never met.
The little girls with rooms covered in posters are still a fresh memory from not too long ago. The way the air felt when they came home from school and played their favourite song is still almost tangible, if you try hard enough.
Those little girls are now women in their early twenties, clinging on to the past by listening to old songs with their adult friends and bonding over experiences they were once having in completely different places at the same time.
Liam Payne’s death marks the loss of a connection many young women have with the little girls they once were. I can feel the world changing, and how it won’t ever be the same. It can’t be. One Direction won’t ever get back together, or even stand together in a room ever again.
The legacy they built will be here forever, and will remain unaltered from this point on. The songs I’d heard when I was 11 are frozen as they were, tempting me to allow my mind to float back in time.
But I hear the lyrics now from a new perspective. I’ve learnt things about the band that I’m glad I didn’t know when I was a girl. I know things about the industry now that I didn’t understand before. My childhood looks slightly different from here.
Liam Payne was my childhood. His voice in all the songs; in all of the online videos I watched; in all the questionable fan-written stories I read, based loosely on all the real stories that taught us what we thought was every single detail about the band.
It wasn’t. Learning that there was more to the story shattered little pieces of my girlhood, information I keep hidden from the little girl I hold onto inside of me.
Liam Payne’s tragic ending forced me and many others to cut ties with certain parts of ourselves, important parts that shaped us into who we are today. I will always remember growing up in the world of One Direction.
The memories I have and the impacts of the band will live on inside of me, and out in the world through all of us – sharing our sadness and our stories with one another.
Losing a part of that will not take the memories away, only remind us to treasure them through the pain of knowing that we are only getting older and that it’s crazy just how fast the night changes.
