The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

Every person has a secret. Every secret has a story. And in my head, every story has a happy ending.

I don’t think I’m ready for a new relationship. I don’t think I’ll ever be.” “Maybe the universe will surprise you.”

They fought and disagreed, of course, but they always came back together like a binary star, dancing with each other through life.

there was nothing quite like the silence of a well-loved library.

How could it be a year already and still my heart hurt this much?

I hated that I cried when I was angry, or upset, or annoyed. I hated that I cried at the slightest flux of emotional nuance.

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.

but it was instinct. To comfort him. Even though I wanted someone to comfort me, too.

I like words. I like shaping them. I like how the stories you create can be kind and good, and I like how they can never fail you,

I tried love. It didn’t work. The end.

Time was both passing too fast and not fast enough.

I feared the sadness in my soul was sopping up the silence like a sponge. I felt heavier with each breath. It was no longer a soft silence, but a still one.

We aren’t a gothic horror novel. We’re a love story.”

“I believe people. Even if it’s weird, even if it doesn’t make sense, I want to believe them. I want to see the good in them. I give my heart to everyone I meet and I put it in everything I do. And sometimes it hurts—often it hurts, actually

“I can’t ever control how someone else treats me, but I can control how I choose to live and how I choose to treat others.

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.

And Ben was smiling. Really, truly smiling. It sent a shock straight through my core because he’d never smiled like that before. At least not for me. He was beautiful. It made my heart skip at the thought,

“You are perfect.” “Am I?” “Do I need to repeat myself?” “As often as I deem necessary.” His fingers twitched, and he curled them tightly into fists. “You are perfect,”

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

Because Dad was right, in the end, about love. It was loyal, and stubborn, and hopeful.

‘Love is a celebration,’ ” I read, my voice wobbling, “ ‘of life and death. It stays with you. It lingers,

“Love comes when you least expect it.

the universe sends you the things you need exactly when you need them,

“Florence—” he began, and winced again. He clutched his chest. “I—I want to stay but I . . .” He couldn’t. He was begging me to let him go. I took a deep breath. The good goodbyes were what you made of them.

I turned back to Ben, and I smiled the only kind of smile I could muster. It was sad and broken, but it was mine.

thank you for wanting to live in mine.”

All I wanted to do was take his face in my hands and kiss him, but as I reached out to try, his eyes widened. He sucked in a short breath. As if he saw something past me. Something I couldn’t see. Something I never would. And then he was gone. Forever this time.

“I’ve said goodbye to so many people—shouldn’t it be easy now?” Alice gave me a strange look. “Who told you that lie? It’s never easy.

There is no happy ending, there’s just . . . happily living. As best you can.

He was right in the end. Romance wasn’t dead, after all.

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.

“I knew you once,” he said so ardently, it made my heart flutter.

I squeezed his hand tightly, too. It was a reassurance to myself, standing in this small bed-and-breakfast, that he was actually here. Real.

“Always. I’m yours, Florence Day,” he said, and kissed my knuckles. Those words made my heart soar. “Ardently?” “Fervently. Zealously. Keenly. Passionately yours.” “And I’m yours,” I whispered,