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.

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

“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,