The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

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 shook my head. “I’m not that pretty, Ben.” He gave me a strange look. His eyelashes were long, and the ocher flecks in his

eyes glimmered in the dim evening light. “But you are.”

That I’d wish that this moment in the field would last forever. That we never had to leave, that we could freeze time and live in this moment where the sun was high and warm and the sky was a crystalline blue and my heart beat bright in my chest and he was here.

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.

Love wasn’t a whisper in the quiet night. It was a yelp into the void, screaming that you were here.

She told me that you don’t ever lose the sadness, but you learn to

love it because it becomes a part of you, and bit by bit, it fades. And, eventually, you’ll pick yourself back up and you’ll find that you’re okay. That you’re going to be okay. And eventually, it’ll be true.”

“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.”

“How come when I told myself the same thing a thousand times I didn’t believe me, but when you say it, it feels true?” “Because I’m rarely wrong.”