True Love Never Dies

Even if it would be easier if it did.

Once upon a time a boy and a girl fell in love.

A million stories start just like that, because there is no greater potential for adventure than when two people fall in love. True love presents infinite pathways leading to euphoria and tragedy, satisfaction and disappointment, exhilaration and despair. True love can span lifetimes or disappear in the flutter of a nervous heartbeat. Libraries full of books have been written attempting to recreate the experience. Musicians have spent centuries trying to express just a sample of the sensation in song.

But true love is something that has to be experienced firsthand. The emotion arises organically, whether it’s wanted or not, and the recipients have no choice but to embrace it. Even if doing so makes everything else in their lives exponentially more difficult.

Fortunately, no such complications existed between this boy and girl. Not at first anyway. The two of them reveled in each other’s company. Awkward glances led to giggles and bashful approbation. Nervous chatter evolved into excited babbling and playful banter. Fingertips brushed against each other’s skin, almost accidentally at first. A real charge passed between them, activating a kind of magnetism in their cells. Fingers intertwined, breaths shortened, and then, they kissed.

Their fates sealed, they did a lot more of the things people in love usually did. They laughed. They danced. They kissed a bunch more, sometimes in unexpected spots. They made plans. And, of course, like all young couples in love, they held hands and skipped through a meadow.

“Tra-la-la-la-la,” the girl sang as she danced through the wildflowers.

“Tra-la-la—” the boy tried to repeat, but he did not finish the tune.

A lightning bolt came out of nowhere and struck him mid-lyric. The jolt came so fast he didn’t even have time to cry out or feel pain. He simply dropped dead in the flowers, his rigid body a blackened, smoking husk. The girl had time to scream though. In fact, she did not stop screaming for a very long time. Her cries eventually turned into tears, but this change was only on the outside. Inside, her heart was torn to shreds and there was no way to fix it.

A lot of people are dishonest about love. They exaggerate their affection or downplay their misgivings. In short, they prefer to play pretend. They do this to fool themselves, or sometimes to fool others. Perhaps they believe if they can convince themselves (or even others) that they’re happy, maybe it will eventually come true. But there’s no faking the real thing, and there’s no miracle cure for the devastation left behind when it’s suddenly ripped away for no rational reason.

Heartbroken, the girl wallowed in her grief. Then she decided to do something about it. She was going to get her love back.

“How do you plan on doing that?” someone asked.

She didn’t know, but she’d heard enough talk since the boy’s death to give her a few ideas. Everyone she met at the funeral was eager to tell her the boy was in a better place. This made no sense, because there could be no better place for him than in her arms, but they assured her that an afterlife did exist and that he was there, watching over her. Skeptical as she might have been, if this was true, she simply needed to track him down and drag him back to this life to be with her. Despite all their talk of paradise, she didn’t expect the boy to put up much of a fight.

To start, she sought out the teachings of history’s greatest philosophers and spiritual leaders. The Greeks envisioned an Underworld when they died, a drab mirror image of Earth in greyscale. People were resigned to going there, because they had to go somewhere apparently, but no one looked forward to it. The Underworld was hardly a reward. It was simply more life, and a fairly colorless and uninspiring version of it at that. If the boy was there, he couldn’t have been enjoying it.

But the good news was there were accounts of people breaking out of it all the time. Odysseus himself had accomplished the feat, so there was no reason to believe she couldn’t match him. The girl simply had to find it first. So she bought a shovel and started digging. If it was indeed under the world, as its name implied, she just needed to keep shoveling and it would only be a matter of time before she found it. With any luck, she’d stumble upon the River Styx, which legend said would take her straight to her love.

She had no such luck, however. No matter where she dug, and she tried so many different spots, she came up empty, more or less. Unless you count discovering the body of Jimmy Hoffa, an entirely new species of dinosaur, and enough oil to make her generationally wealthy as a success, which she didn’t. Her efforts produced nothing resembling an underground world of spirits and ghouls. Heck, she never even came close to sniffing China.

Giving up on the Underworld, she turned her attention to the Misty Islands instead. She didn’t know much about them, but they were supposed to be an archipelago somewhere in the western ocean. The exact ocean was never specified, of course, and they were not represented on any map. Legend said the Misty Islands were populated by Elves who welcomed heroes into their company. And what was her love, if not a hero of sorts?

Perhaps she was a reaching a bit on that one, but the islands were described as an ethereal place full of elves and castles and magical cloaks. In other words, the kind of place he might enjoy. If she found him, maybe they could stay there together forever. That sounded a lot nicer than settling in Pittsburgh or somewhere like that. So with that goal in mind, she spent all of her oil money hiring a fleet of ships outfitted with state-of-the-art search equipment, but none of them found the Misty Islands.

Reluctantly, she took a more modern approach. Almost everyone she knew, regardless of their exact religion, believed in a heaven that existed in the clouds. The imagery was remarkably consistent, despite their disagreements on other spiritual matters, and that gave her hope that they were on to something.

In their descriptions, the dead lounged on puffy white clouds, dressed in matching white robes, sometimes strumming harps. No one played guitar or percussion in heaven apparently. Sometimes the dead had wings, and other times the wings belonged only to their angel overlords. These strange creatures were God’s secret service, carrying out His orders while He kicked back on His golden throne and stroked His beard.

Given the boy’s fear of heights and his aversion to terrycloth, she was convinced he would be only too eager to escape. Of course, getting him past the warden and His flying guards might be tricky, but she was confident they could overcome any obstacle together. Determined, she stole a hot air balloon, having exhausted all her oil funds on boats, and spent the next year scouring the skies. Out of fuel, she floated down empty-handed and more heartbroken than ever.

Growing more desperate, the girl next studied the concept of reincarnation. The idea was intriguing, and she found some comfort in the theory that no one ever truly left the world. Instead, they were simply refurbished and put to another use. But if this was true, it meant the boy could be practically anything. Would the universe have a particular mission in mind for him? How could she find him?

Perhaps he’d been brought back as the leaves changing colors in the autumn, meant to bring a little beauty and happiness into her life in his new form. There was a kind of poetry in the thought, but she got no response when she whispered to them, sharing stories of their time together. The whole exercise made her feel like a rube.

She felt only marginally less ridiculous talking to the giraffes at the zoo. He once told her giraffes were his favorite animal, so maybe it was possible that he came back as one. And if he wasn’t one of the giraffes at that particular zoo, maybe she could get a message to him through the worldwide giraffe network, if such a thing existed. But the giraffes only chewed their leaves and showed no signs of understanding her.

Feeling foolish and frustrated, the girl turned to her last resort. Lovers Leap was an isolated cliff in the mountains. Legend had it that the souls of dead people in love congregated at the bottom of the cliff. Their surviving companions, heartsick and lonely, had only to jump from the top to reunite with them forever.

Many a forlorn lover had given it a shot, though no one could prove whether it paid off or not. Now the girl climbed to the top of the cliff and walked through the expanse of purple flowers covering the summit. They reminded her of the flowers in the meadow, and their last day together. Standing at the precipice, she couldn’t see the bottom. There was only darkness below.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a voice warned her.

Startled, she turned to see an old man standing behind her at the edge of the flowers. “What do you know about it?” she asked, getting defensive.

The old man forced a smile. The expression possessed a hardened quality, but it was not uncaring. “My first love is down there too,” he said, gesturing toward the bottom of the cliff.

“Your first love?” she said. Her tone said more than her words. The way she said it suggested the term first love was meaningless, because there could only be one love. She was living proof of that. How could anyone experience the agony she felt every day and ever think about falling in love again? The idea was blasphemous.

The old man softened a bit and ran his hand against the purple flowers. “Do you know these flowers are always in bloom?” he said. “Hundreds of years and they never wither and die. It should be impossible. And yet, here they are.”

The girl looked confused. “So?”

“I think it’s the lost ones at the bottom who do it,” he said. “I think they keep the flowers blooming to remind us they’re still there.” He chuckled. “Or maybe it’s just something in the water. I don’t know, but I like my explanation better.”

The girl wasn’t sure what to make of him. “What do you want?” she asked. Her tone wasn’t rude, but it was uncertain.

“To share a thought or two about love with you.”

“Like what?”

The old man plucked a purple flower. “I don’t know what happens to us after we die,” he said. “But I do know we’re not here anymore, and there’s at least a chance we don’t exist at all.”

He paused, allowing his words to sink. “Your love has already taken that step and there’s nothing that can change that now. If you follow him, yes, there is a small sliver of a chance that you’ll be reunited in some new existence. But there’s at least as good a chance, and, if we’re being completely honest, a considerably better chance, that you’ll also be wiped off the face of the universe as soon as you splatter against those rocks.”

“So?” the girl countered. “What makes you think that would be worse than living without him?”

The old man sniffed the flower. “Look at this way,” he said. “The love you shared still exists in you. It may only feel like pain now, and you might confuse that for its loss, but if your love was really lost, it wouldn’t hurt at all anymore. It’s still there, and as long as you’re still breathing, it will survive. But if you take a nose dive off the cliff, it may truly be lost forever. And that would be a shame, don’t you think?”

The girl opened her mouth to respond, but the old man cut her off. “What you’re too young to understood now is that love is resilient. It doesn’t die easily, and it can be nursed back to health. The two of you created it together, and even though he’s gone, you can keep it going. And that’s how you keep him alive. The important thing is to never let it wilt. That’s the only way you can ever truly lose him.”

He handed her the purple flower. She noticed a rough, jagged line running from one of the petals to the stem. “No one said it wouldn’t have a few scars,” he said with a shrug. “But it will thrive again. And maybe someday you’ll want to share it with someone else. Maybe lots of someone elses.” He paused. “I have.”

“But you still come back here.”

He nodded. “From time to time,” he said. “We all do. Some of us water the flowers with our tears. Others blow a kiss to the bottom of the cliff. And some of us just like to talk. Every now and then, one of us jumps. I don’t judge them, but I do pity them.”

“I find it hard not to envy them.”

“Maybe,” he said, gently closing her fingers around the flower. “But no light reaches the bottom. How do you expect to find what you’re looking for in the dark?”

The girl fought back a sniffle. He wiped away the tears welling in the corners of her eyes. “You should go home,” he said. “Instead of continuing your search, perhaps you should let him find his way back to you.”

“How’s that supposed to happen?”

The old man flashed a grin that threatened to crack the skin around his lips. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it does. Often in the strangest of ways. Know what I mean?”

She didn’t, but she took his advice and went home without making the leap. The girl put the purple flower in a vase by her open window and went to sleep. Her dreams were about the boy, but she struggled to retain any details in the morning. As she tried to piece them together, a breeze blew into the room, despite the air outside being very still. Wafting over the stationary flower, it filled the air with a bittersweet scent.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Pulp. I hope you enjoyed the story. And if you did, why not stick around for a second and purchase my upcoming novel, Shivering in Hell. It releases on September 1, 2026, but you can pre-order it in paperback or on Kindle (only $4.99!) right now. Just click on the banner below for the link.