The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing. But I was wrong. 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.

Small moments you catch, and keep in glass jars like fireflies, or you let go.

There is no happy ending, there’s just . . . happily living. As best you can.