The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

Publishing was all very romantic until you found yourself in publishing. Then it was just another kind of corporate hell.

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.

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.

“It might not be in one book. It might be in five or ten. It might be little bits of all of us scattered throughout your stories. But I know you’ll write us, however messy we are, and it’ll be good.”

I couldn’t catch this moment; I couldn’t keep it—I couldn’t keep him.

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.

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