I've been getting so many One Direction tiktoks since Liam died and thinking a lot about how the boys and I were both children when One Direction was a band. I've thought a lot about what Larry meant to me as a teenager, that it was a model for what I wanted love to feel and look like. I'd never seen anyone in love like that before or if I had, I hadn't known to pay attention. Before them I couldn't picture it for myself. I don't think I knew it was real.
At 16, I believed that what I was seeing was love or at least what I wanted love to look like, but never having had it, I couldn't be sure. It feels strange to be 28 now and so far on the other side of things, to see those videos again and feel the mirror image of that recognition - not my yearning for intimacy but knowing that in the intervening years I've had what I saw in those videos when I was young and still learning how to want. It did become real for me, almost exactly as I pictured it. And you wonder what happened to them, in the end.
