The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

Jonathan liked to pretend, to put on characters the way other people put on clothes. He wore a fake mustache three days a week. He entertained casual friendships with at least a dozen people who knew him as Fodor Leyontiev, an émigré from the former Soviet Union, a poor violinist who still longed for the borscht of his childhood.

Someone who perhaps, with his neat, clean hands and dark, intelligent eyes, might widen her world, not because it needed to be wider but because the opposite, a narrowing, might otherwise be inevitable.

I don’t believe there is anything wrong with offering a gullible person hope, so long as that person believes it to be genuine. In fact, I think hope, even if premised on a falsehood, can be a thing of great power.”

the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.

I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naïve believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it. And yet. And yet! We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for?