It's 2025 and Zouis is back and I need to talk about it with someone
Sorry for making this Zouis ask about Liam, it's just all I can kind of think about.
In the immediate aftermath of Liam's death, I was really rankled by what I was sort of seeing as the symbologization (not a word? ok just go with me here) of his death. People were talking about it as a moment that was emblematic of the death of their childhoods, or of their innocence. It really felt to me like for most people his death wasn't like... about him, at all. And I understand that it feels complicated to grieve someone who by all accounts behaved badly, abused those around him, and whose struggles with mental health and addiction radiated outward to harm those he purported to care about. I understand that our engagement with the cult of celebrity, for better or worse, has come to require us to make these kinds of qualifications. I'm not exempt from it; I wrote a version of this answer that tried not to say all that, and felt like I couldn't post it lmao. I was looking back at some of the conversations I was having at the time with 1D friends and this from rocky really stays true:
and at the end of the day i have lost my appetite for speculation over the last few years, and especially since liam's death, but i do think that zayn and louis are two people who saw liam with a little more clarity and generosity during the course of his life. it's easy to point to times louis was trying to be in his corner over the past few years partly because i think he was probably trying to reach liam any way he could, and that was just inherently more visible. i don't know if zayn and liam ever really mended fences, but i know during the height of 1D when it felt like louis was on less of an even keel, zayn seemed like he had liam's back, and like he cared about him.
unexpected loss casts a different light on so many things. louis has said that zayn not showing up for him after his mother died was the final nail in their friendship's coffin, and i get that. but i also know louis has an enormous capacity for forgiveness; he and liam fell out for a couple of years after one direction, and at the time we all speculated, and we'll probably never know what happened or what changed, only that it did.
anyway if it were me, i think i would just. want to hang out with somebody on the other side of this tragedy who thought it was okay to like and love liam payne without qualifying it or prefacing it. i would want to grieve with someone who thought he was a person.
