The Deadly Combination: Open-Hearted, Soulful, and Hopelessly Romantic

A love letter to bring the 'New Romantics' back to life.

May 31, 2025

How many times have I fallen in love?

With a heart that beats as deeply as mine? Gosh, more times than I can count.

It’s actually kind of wild. I fall in love every time I blink, breathe, bathe, and bask. I fall in love with smiles, stories, songs, and souls. Don’t ask me why. I just LOVE them!!

I fall in love every morning, every afternoon, and every night. Love is like an ocean—and I’m Moana. Always seeking my next great adventure in its deepest, darkest, murkiest depths and sparkling cerulean shores.

Some would call me a hopeless romantic. I don’t deny it. Romance raised me.

The endings of love stories like the embrace of a mother or grandmother. First kisses like warm honey. Guttural cries in the night that taught me to sing. Shooting stars in the eyes of a lover that showed me my own royal heart. Secret goodbyes, old Victorian houses, teatime, rose gardens. All of it. I’m hopeless.

My sanctuary, my lifeblood.
My downfall.

Love is in everything, and I fall for all of it.

But no worries. Heartbreak is a national anthem us new romantics must sing proudly.

It’s not our fault that we fall in love and fall out of love and get our hearts broken again and again. We’re lowkey addicted to the rise and fall of our own chest. There’s just something divine in it.

So, we stay just a little longer.

We lose ourselves in love, in longing, in the feeling of our own body underneath the sun, in the poetry of the what never quite was. Ugh, we just can’t help it (we love danger). Not to worry though, we come back eventually.

This Love always does.

Which is the best and worst part of it all. Because we know exactly what we’re doing on our road to ruin. Without the dance of love and loss, we’d honestly lose our minds–and that thought is sometimes too much to bear. So again, we stay.

We wish upon our little stars. We worship the beautiful downfalls and disasters again and again, with tears that burn, yes, but also purify and set us free.

In my life, I’ve had the honor of being chosen for my radiant light and love again and again. And also the dishonor of being left because the waters ran deeper than the light initially led on.

It’s hard work being a mirror for true love. Sighhh (jkjk, it’s so fun!).

You could say I’m a fool to flirt with death like this, but it’s not my choice.

It’s my soul, you see.

Flirting with life and death is my favorite pasttime.

When you have surrendered as I have to Life and Love, you will understand. You’ll understand why I take the risk. But I can’t help you. You have to choose it for yourself. It’s a process. A journey one has to walk in solitude, though never alone.

One day you will understand that living from the soul, with an open heart vulnerable at all times, and a beautifully deluded but magical sense of romanticism may feel like death, but it’s actually just rebirth. It’s living life like prayer and treating life like class.

And I wouldn’t trade this life for the world. Why? Because this freedom is hard to beat.
This love and adoration rarely found, though often uncovered (just like a Secret Garden).

It feels right to be here now, in the cemetery, realizing this as a little yellow squiggler lands on the page and grabs my attention from the pleasures of reverie.

Some type of larva—transformation in its earliest stages. Vulnerability, softness, hidden potential, metamorphosis, trust in the unseen, solar plexus in color.

Interrupting my thoughts with a signal. PSA: you are in the middle of becoming—starting a new life in a place of death.

Swoon, how romantic.🥰
A sign that my hard-earned freedom and deep love are once again birthing something quietly sacred—even if no one else sees it yet.
I look up from the page, feeling done for now as I take in the sight of a serene pond with windy ripples on its surface and a nearby stone that reads: ‘Thumbs Garlile. Guitar Player.’ He passed at 56. How curious.