on grieving what isn't yours

let's pray we stay young / stay made of lightning

I feel the need to caveat the below by saying this is a strange post that has nothing to do with motherhood or fashion or care work or any of the usual topics I find myself preoccupied by. Nor does it have anything particularly profound to say about grief or fandom or celebrity. I suppose it’s mostly about letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves, etc, and how once, for me, that was a boy band.

Last night, as I doing the dinner-bath-bedtime march, chasing the girls through the house, picking up a line of discarded clothes, managing arguments over who gets to play with the yellow cup, I got a text from a friend saying she was so sorry to hear about Liam Payne.

It was a split-screen moment, a hiccup: in one world, my four-and-a-half year old was screaming her bathtub demand: “Siri, play texas holdum by fiancé!”; in the other, it was 2015 and Logan was sending me frantic texts because One Direction dropped “Drag Me Down” in the middle of the night and I needed to wake up immediately, nothing this important had ever happened before or would ever happen again. I googled the news and my stomach hollowed out. I wanted to call someone. I wanted to get on Tumblr. I wanted to run down a Brooklyn street holding Logan’s hand and scream-singing our songs. I wanted to be back in the stadium surrounded by other crying girls, unabashed and made whole. I had felt collective joy, and now I wanted to feel collective grief. I looked at my soap-slick daughters, runny noses and wrinkling fingers, and realized that they likely wouldn’t exist were it not for One Direction, which is a foolish thing to say, I suppose, but there you have it.

FEELINGS, 2015. this is a ridiculous series of photos, but for a time i would take selfies of myself watching 1D videos because i had genuinely forgotten what my face looked like when experiencing raw emotion

The simplest story is that I was a kid who felt things deeply, and then for a while I didn’t feel things at all. I went through an ugly breakup in my mid-20s, moved to NYC, and tried to cultivate the sort of disaffected nihilism that would spare me more pain. When I found the 1D fandom I was almost 30. I had given up certain ideas about the world and about myself, namely that I could love without fear, that whole-throated joy was a feeling I had access to.

One Direction brought me back to life. The band allowed me to love, or more accurately, allowed me to remember how it feels to love, to remember the power inherent in loving something that can never return that love, loving simply for the purity of it, for joy and joy alone. The heart-bursting stupidity and consumption of that, and of doing it collectively, alongside other people who also love the thing you love. I memorized the discography and went down the rabbit holes and read the fic and made new friends and pored over every grainy YouTube video of the boys, especially the early ones, back when they were just five goofy boys who couldn't believe their dumb luck - - a feeling not unlike falling in love, which is what I allowed myself to do, finally, after years of being convinced that was no longer available to me.

I made space in my busted up heart for a boy band, and in doing so, I allowed my heart to take up space in the world again. I decided I wanted love, and I opened myself to it, and on our first date I told my now-husband that my only hobby was loving One Direction and no, I would not be ashamed. Loving One Direction taught me how to wield my love like a battle axe, furiously and without apology. It is wholly different from and yet not unlike how I love my kids. It is rare, and I am grateful for it.

These days, my feelings have a different quality. A heavier one. I think that is part of growing up, and it is also part of why fandom is so intoxicating, even—or especially—at an age at which you are supposed to have grown out of it. Of course it’s silly to care about a boy band! But doesn’t it feel good? And doesn’t feeling good—choosing joy, after all that—feel a bit like you’re getting away with something? My feelings about One Direction have nothing to do with my terror over Lily heading back to the hospital, or my fury and grief over children in Gaza being burned alive by war criminals, or the anxiety I feel about the upcoming election. They are a respite. They exist outside of reality.

But if One Direction the band existed outside of reality, the boys existed within it, or at least within the ugly hall-of-mirrors that is fame. It's always strange to mourn someone you never knew, to grieve their outline more than anything else. I haven't followed the boys that closely since the "hiatus," in part because it was the alchemy of them together that was so captivating to me, and I prefer to keep them locked in amber, 15-year-old puppy dog boys, all long-limbs and floppy hair. We don’t like our idols to change. But they do. Liam was clearly unwell. A past partner has alleged some really shit behavior. Some people on the Internet will say he had it coming. We may give celebrities everything, but we demand even more in return.

I don't know who Liam Payne actually was, but he was, after all that, just a boy. For a while he felt like mine. In the wake of his death, I keep thinking about the moment in the 1D documentary when Liam’s mom buys herself a life-sized cardboard cutout of her son. She’s just a mom who misses her boy. As Harry’s step dad put it, they were just kids who went to audition for a singing competition and never came home again.

I hope he’s home now. I hope he found some peace. I hope everyone who loves him—the boys, his family, his son, the fans—finds peace, too. I hope everyone, my daughters especially, one day get the gift of loving something as foolishly as I loved those boys.