The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

She knew what she wanted, and she always went for it. That was her mantra. “You see it, you reach for it.”

Words to live by!!!!

It always struck me how different Carver and Nicki were—like a square peg and a round hole—but I guess they were like pieces in a puzzle. They found grooves where the other person fit, and that’s how they worked.

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.

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.”

He hoped I asked for help because asking was not a weakness—but a strength. He hoped that I would ask more often, because I would be surprised by who would come into my life if I let them. Not all of my companions would be ghosts.

‘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. Listen for me when the wind rushes through the trees. I love you.’ ”

“Good things don’t wait, and neither should you,” Mom had said.

Great advice

He and Mom laughed, and it pulled at something deep in my chest. It ached, but not in the way I’d felt when Dad died. 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.