sunday scaries: liam payne

spaces - one direction

my phone was bombarded with texts, calls, and dms on various social media platforms on wednesday night. once the initial shock and disbelief gave out, i felt this deep sense of gratitude that people i had not heard from in years were reaching out. because 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 an…