The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

I couldn’t wait for him to hug me again—and then I remembered, like a stone dropping into my stomach—that he wouldn’t. Ever again.

And just for a second—one second longer—I wanted to be that Florence, and live in that pocket of time again. But it was gone, and so was my dad.

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.

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.

“You did say romance was dead.” I tilted my head, looking at his reflection in the mirror. “Aren’t you?”

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

“These last few days have been . . . beautiful. It’s a good ending, darling. As your editor, I have no notes.”