The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

I bought things when I was nervous. Mainly books but—I guess now I bought houseplants, too.

Love was putting up with someone for fifty years so you’d have someone to bury you when you died. I would know; my family was in the business of death.

“So, did you figure out what to do with the editor for Christina Lauren?” “Christina and Lauren write their own books,” I replied automatically. “But no, I didn’t.”

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.

He perked, like a golden retriever who’d finally been asked to go for walkies.

Because loneliness was the kind of ghost that haunted you long after you were dead. It stood over your plot in the cemetery where a lone name sat carved in marble. It sat with your urn. It was the wind that carried your ashes when no one claimed your body.

I 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.”

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

Because ghost stories were just love stories about here and then and now and when, about pockets of happiness and moments that resonated in places long after their era. They were stories that taught you that love was never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.

My hand was already in a tight fist. It would’ve been a shame to waste it. So I turned and I slammed it straight into his motherfucking nose.

Making love and making stories were close to the same thing. You were intimate and vulnerable and wandering, traveling across the landscape of each other, learning. You told a story with each gesture, each sound—every kiss a period, every gasp a comma.