One Direction has always been better at saying goodbye than I could ever be. I’ve always struggled with the finality of farewell, always jumping through as many mental hoops as I needed to in order to convince myself that the people, places, and feelings left behind could always come back. At 17, a month after my high school graduation, I sat in my bedroom surrounded by boxes holding my entire life in them. There was a mix of fear and excitement for my future — set for a city hundreds of miles away from the place where I spent the most formative years of my life — but I didn’t know how to merge that with the grief of growing up. On my last night in that room, its walls bare again after years of being plastered in One Direction posters, I listened to “Walking in the Wind” for hours.
“We had some good times, didn’t we? We had some good tricks up our sleeve,” they sang on the pre-chorus. “Goodbyes are bittersweet, but it’s not the end — I’ll see your face again.” Their last album as a band, Made in the A.M., is full of these kinds of final send-offs. They were so good at saying goodbye that I didn’t realize it was happening until we entered the second or third year of the 18-month break they were supposed to reunite after. We’re nearly at the nine-year mark now, but it’s probably time to stop counting. I spent another few hours with “Walking in the Wind” on repeat last night, this time grieving a loss too tangible to be temporary — a death.
Liam Payne died on Oct. 16 from injuries sustained after falling from the balcony of his hotel room. After the news broke, I thought about the inevitability of having to write out that sentence. I worried almost immediately about having the language to discuss his death outside of the circles of people who would innately understand without me having all of the right words. I spent a lot of time seeking comfort with these people yesterday — the ones I first met when we were teenagers running One Direction fan accounts on Twitter. I can remember just as vividly seeing everyone post their prom and graduation photos as I can the nights we all spent live tweeting album leaks, music video releases, and awards show appearances together. Some of them have children and spouses now. Some I hadn’t seen post about One Direction in years, with their careers and lives having outgrown the containment of our bubble.
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In recent years, the general state of stan culture has evolved into something unrecognizable to me. I’m hyper-aware of how parasocial this all may read to someone who didn’t experience it themselves. But the community that One Direction fans collectively built around them more than a decade ago feels frozen in time. Less than three months ago, I was sweaty and winded at a One Direction-themed club night dancing with friends who feel like family to me — some of the greatest people I’ve ever known, who I would never have encountered if we didn’t each find ourselves overwhelmed with an urge to talk about our favorite boy band with millions of strangers online. We’ve cried in each other’s arms at Harry Styles concerts and lost our voices screaming “Stockholm Syndrome” when Niall Horan slipped it into his solo setlist.
It never felt like One Direction would ever truly be over, so long as we had these memories and these people and these songs. They’ve been one of the most consistent components of my life since I was 13 years old. At 26, I still feel wholly indebted to them for leading me to my best friends, to my career, to heights of happiness I’ve never known how to access through anything else. Even after all this time, some part of me always believed they would come back. That I’d be arm in arm with those same people at a reunion show when we’re all in our forties. That we’d see all five of them onstage — Niall, Harry, Louis, Liam, even Zayn — and think back to the grainy live streams we would watch of the Up All Night tour in 2012. At the end of their last single, “History,” they sang: “So don’t let me go, we can live forever.”
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The version of One Direction that we have all held onto hasn’t existed for quite some time. It lives forever only in the sense that it lives within all of us. But the reality of their true impermanence has left us with even more ghosts to grieve in the wake of Liam’s death. There’s no way to neatly detach the mourning of a person present in every scene of the memory reel playing through our minds from the person he was outside of our lens of fandom — someone who was sued by his ex-fiance for harassment and accused of domestic violence in that same relationship. Someone who struggled with substance abuse at the height of the fame that we gave him. There isn’t a single combination of the correct words to truly communicate the source and feeling of this aching sadness unless it has burrowed into your chest, too. If it has, you don’t need them.
Last night, I went searching through One Direction’s discography to see if they knew what to say. They always have. On “Spaces,” I found: “Spaces between us keep getting deeper/It’s harder to reach ya, even though I’ve tried/Spaces between us hold all our secrets/Leavin’ us speechless and I don’t know why/Who’s gonna be the first to say goodbye?” On “Moments,” I found: “If we could only have this life for one more day/If we could only turn back time … I’ll find the words to say before you leave me today.” After a while, I returned to “Walking in the Wind,” the song that has always helped me say goodbye to the people and time that I can’t get back but that live on in my heart. “And I know we’ll be alright, child, just close your eyes and see,” they promise on the bridge. “I’ll be by your side, anytime you’re needing me.”
