The Afterlife Of Art: How Storytelling Keeps Love Alive

Some loves don’t get a second chance in life. But in stories—mine always do.

There’s a sacred ache that comes with remembering, especially when the remembering is wrapped in fiction. The details blur, shift, swell. We rewrite the things we wish we’d said, the glances we wish we’d stolen, the goodbyes we never got to give. In this way, storytelling becomes a resurrection—a place where the heart can linger longer, where nothing is quite over yet. Not really.

When I write, I do so with the belief that stories are the only true afterlife we can promise one another.

Because memory is a brittle thing. It yellows like old paper. It fades around the edges. It confuses dates and loses names and forgets the sound of someone’s laugh until one day, even that is gone. But a story? A story holds. A story keeps.

And that is why I write.

Not just to capture what was. But to expand it. To eternalize it. To render it in light so even the shadows feel holy.

Fiction As A Kind Of Forever

There is something deeply intimate about writing fiction that feels truer than fact. It isn’t about accuracy—it’s about essence. It’s about capturing the heartbeat of something too big for memory, too sacred for simple retelling. Fiction doesn’t replicate reality; it reveals its undercurrent. Its quiet truth. Its secret music.

In my own love story, there are details I will never share with the world. Moments so sacred, even my favourite sentences aren’t worthy. But when I write, I chase the feeling of them. I dress other people in our pain and our joy. I give my characters our laughter, our arguments, our awe-struck glances across rooms, across years, across lives. I hand them our flaws. I offer them our grace.

And sometimes, I give them the ending we never got.

Because fiction is how I keep loving the versions of us I wasn’t ready to lose.

The Art Of Loving Through Time

Every great love story bends time. You fall in love, and the world reshapes itself around the other person. A minute feels like an hour. A year like a breath. Time begins to stretch and collapse in on itself. And when that person is gone—whether by distance or death or the unrelenting ache of change—time becomes a wound.

But stories let me time-travel.

They let me slip back into the glow of a first kiss, the heat of a sun-drenched afternoon, the sweetness of a look across a crowded room that says I see you. I always see you.

Writing is how I return.

It is also how I forgive.

Because we’re never as perfect in life as we are on the page. We say the wrong things. We leave when we should have stayed. We cling when we should have let go. But in fiction, I can let them linger. I can make them softer. Or braver. Or simply more seen. I can honour the parts of us that weren’t ready yet. I can imagine a version of love that outlives the mess, the pain, the goodbye.

Grief, Rewritten

Grief is the tax we pay for love—but writing is the rebate. A fragile one, maybe. But real.

It gives me back what was taken.

It lets me hold hands with ghosts.

When I write about love that once existed—whether my own or imagined—I’m not trying to recreate the past. I’m trying to commune with it. To tell it I remember. To tell it I still care.

Because grief doesn’t end, it only changes shape. And storytelling is the shape I give mine.

A Love That Doesn’t Fade

I used to believe that writing about someone was the final act of letting go. I don’t believe that anymore.

Now I believe it’s the opposite.

Now I believe it’s how we hold on. How we keep them alive. How we reach across time and whisper:

You mattered.
You mattered so much, I made you a cathedral out of paragraphs.
I built you a home on every page.
I turned our love into a constellation so it could always shine, even when I couldn’t see it anymore.

This, I think, is what it means to create from the heart. Not just to express love—but to preserve it.

Because art is an afterlife.

And in my afterlife, we are still dancing. Still laughing. Still choosing each other, over and over again.

Forever, but with better lighting.