Mood Ring is a newsletter on life, love, writing, and desserts written by me, an aspiring romance novelist. Great for tenderhearted souls, writers, steadfast readers, dessert lovers, and hopeless romantics.
This is the fourth installment of our October theme: “Nights.” Previous posts can be read here: 1 | 2 | 3
You may have heard Taylor Swift released her tenth album last week—Midnights. I’ll admit I have the songs on repeat. And at any point in the day, you may catch me singing, “get it off your chest, get it off my desk,” over and over again. If you listened to the album, let me know your thoughts.
This letter, though, isn’t really about TS. Mostly, it’s about my experience listening to Midnights. The night she released the album, I put in my headphones, looked up at the ceiling from my bed, and closed my eyes after hitting play. With each song, it felt like the lyrics were crawling into me, pulling out memories I only remember when listening to a Taylor Swift song. I knew what was coming, and by the time I got to a sparkly, pop song titled “Bejeweled,” I couldn’t stop crying.
In that moment, I wanted to pull out my phone and text one person, “I have a song you’d love.” But Jo, my uncle, died unexpectedly, and so unfairly young, in 2015. And the one video I have of him on my phone is him singing Taylor’s “Enchanted” while walking on a treadmill. And the last Taylor song he texted me before he died was “Blank Space.” And sometimes the worst thing I ever feel is just the fact that I can’t text him about a song I know he’d love.
Grief can send you counting. The years and days we had. The years and days we’ve missed. The anniversaries gone by. The birthdays. The holidays. All the conversations you want to have, but can’t. And when Jo died, it took me two years to listen to his favorite songs again. If “Blank Space” was played on the radio, my body would heave under the weight of the memories. Music became complicated the way happy memories can become tinted with sadness. And grief certainly has me counting. I count the albums without him rather than the years. I listen to them in my kitchen with the volume turned up, hoping he’s listening with me. And I try to guess his would-be favorites, though I have no way of knowing.
It feels so true when they say grief is love with nowhere to go. Grief is so intertwined with love. “It’s all the love you want to give,” Jamie Anderson wrote. “All of that unspent love gathers in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in the hollow part in your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
I’ve spent years trying to deal with this leftover love. I tuck love in between lyrics. I tattooed love on my forearm. I write all the texts I want to send. Where else can I send this love? It spills out of me.
Grief, like love, is such a big, complicated feeling. So much so that it can be overwhelming. And an element I often come across reading romance novels is the presence of grief. You’d think loss doesn’t have a place in novels about falling in love, but it does, it fits right in because grief is just another expression of love.
You’ll find characters grieving parents, friends, partners, and more. Romance novels are all about leaning into feelings—good and bad and complicated. At some point in the story, the character will have to confront all the feelings they’ve been running from.
Falling in love is so delicate. “It’s so fucking hard to open yourself up to love or to be loved,” Alicia Thompson wrote in her recent newsletter. Throw grief into the mix and falling in love will become even more complicated.
But I love that these characters feel it all and they make it through. We can lean into big feelings and still be whole. We can feel it all and it’ll be okay. And I want to feel it all while I can.
So I’ll be right here, listening to Midnights, and I’ll sigh when I miss Jojo, and I’ll laugh when I sing, “Karma is a cat purring in my lap 'cause it loves me.”
With love,
Alyssa
Thank you for reading!
I send a Mood Ring letter out every Tuesday. Please forward it along to anyone you think would enjoy it. And if you’d like to check in with me: alysrochwrites@gmail.com.