You haven’t crossed my mind in years, at least that’s what I tell myself, but deep down a part of me never really shut the drawer where I kept you. It creaks open at the worst times, like now, when the world’s gone still—lockdown, COVID, sirens. I haven’t heard your voice in over two years—no texts, no accidental likes on old photos—just silence and still, somehow, it’s you I think of first when it feels like everything might fall apart.

We met in 2010, I was sixteen auditioning for The X Factor without any real plan. I didn’t make it solo, none of us did, but then came you and those four boys who became my brothers. Nicole Scherzinger saw something in us—said we were too talented to send home—and just like that, One Direction was born.

I thought I’d be the youngest, but you were—fifteen, quiet at first, but sharp, brilliant, beautiful in a way that felt dangerous when I was that age. We were inseparable—studio sessions, interviews...day in, day out. It was inevitable someone would fall in love with you. Lucky for me, it wasn’t one of them.

By 2011, you were mine or I was yours, maybe both. We were kids—sixteen and seventeen—but we tried to protect what we had. The press, of course, tore it apart. You were the only girl in the band and the headlines treated you like a fantasy—something to project onto, objectify, pick apart—and when they found out we were together, it got worse, the speculation, the disgusting headlines—“the girl among lions,” “the secret weapon of 1D,” “who’s sleeping with who?”—all of it loud, relentless, invasive.

I still remember how you’d roll your eyes in interviews when men twice our age tried to flirt with you like you weren’t still a teenager. By 2014, everything started unraveling. The fame, the pressure, the rumors—it all numbed me, even us started to feel routine, though you were the only thing keeping me grounded. We fought more, we loved harder, we fucked like we were trying to drown out the noise—hotel bathrooms, studio couches, your hand down my jeans before I’d even closed the door—you liked making me beg, I liked letting you.

We broke in 2015, officially, after one last fight over another rumor we couldn’t outrun. Unofficially? We never really stopped. When the band went on hiatus in 2016, we found our way back to each other. After breakups under the guise of “just catching up", you’d crawl into bed like no time had passed and for a few hours we were just bodies and breath and old muscle memory. You’d leave before morning and I’d pretend not to care, but we both knew it was never just casual and that’s what scared us the most.

By 2019, we stopped speaking for good—you found someone, I did too. We were finally trying to be adults, whatever that meant. I deleted your number, but still remember it, told myself we weren’t meant to last cause it was easier than admitting the truth: we were terrified of repeating our past, of how much we still wanted what we had.

And now it’s 2021, I’m lying in my flat, half-regretting the messages I just sent you. I might be tipsy or completely drunk but it doesn’t change what’s true. Would you come over if I called? If I told you I still have your old sweatshirt stuffed in the back of my drawer? That I still dream about the way you said my name when no one else was around?

But if the world was ending you’d come over, right? Please say you would, lie if you have to.

Cause if the world were ending, I know exactly who I’d want to hold.

You.

We weren’t built for forever, we cracked too easily, but if the sky were falling, maybe none of that would matter, maybe we’d remember how to feel again. You’d slide into my bed like you used to, warm skin, soft breath, your thighs tight around my waist like a question I never dared answer. We wouldn’t talk about what it meant, we’d just let it happen, one last time.