The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

Every person has a secret. Every secret has a story.

He was a bullet journal guy, and I was a sticky note kind of girl.

I just regretted being the kind of girl who fell for someone like him in the first place.

I just wanted what my parents had. I wanted to walk into a ballroom dancing club and meet the love of my life.

Love was a high for a moment that left you hollow when it left, and you spent the rest of your life chasing that feeling.

the wind is just the breath of everyone who came before us. All the people who’ve passed on, all the ones who’ve taken a breath—”

Hindsight was such a bitch. Because everything I ran from had caught up with me.

Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost—it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.

“I read a book once that changed me.

And I recognized that kind of smile, finally. The kind you didn’t really show to strangers. The kind you kept to yourself because the world had been shit, and your heart had been broken so many times by different people and places and stories.

“I guess if everyone found their big love, then the world wouldn’t be such a terrible place most of the time, eh?”

“So—what—you believe in love but just not for you? You believe in romance and grand romantic gestures and happily ever afters but you think there is something so fundamentally wrong with you that you don’t deserve it?”

Here it felt like the world was in slow motion. Everything took its time.

There was nothing but love in those memories.

began to realize that love wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t forever, either. It was something in between, a moment in time where two people existed at the exact same moment in the exact same place in the universe.

It wasn’t because I needed to find out that love existed—of course it did—but it was the hope that I’d find it.

“This is exhausting,” he agreed softly. “All of it. Pretending to be okay while the world changes around you and leaves you behind to sit with whatever loss you found.”

“Everything that dies never really goes. In little ways, it all stays.”

‘Love is a celebration,’ ” I read, my voice wobbling, “ ‘of life and death. It stays with you. It lingers, my darlings, long after I’m gone.

thank you for giving me words when I didn’t think there were any left. I hope you never stop giving the world your words.”

The people who pass through here live on in you and me and everyone they touched.

It was a good sort of pain. The kind that reminded me that I was still alive, and there was still life to live and memories to make and people to meet.