Independent Hearts, Intertwined Stories
From a tree carved with names to the inner life of a solitary heart, love leaves its mark in ways both fleeting and forever.
Welcome to our living anthology, celebrating and supporting the talent of the emerging and seasoned writers of Story Summit.
This issue of Story Summit Voices explores love across timelines and expectations. These three pieces, by two talented writers, invite us to reflect, examine, and perhaps even liberate ourselves—in the name of love.
Nancy Colasurdo’s essay, “Is it Possible to Be Independent and Well Loved?” offers a glimpse into a life both fiercely claimed and deeply contemplated, where independence is not isolation, but the fertile ground from which creative boldness grows. J.P. Holme follows with two poems exploring love through time. In “The Beginning,” she captures the tender state of becoming—when trust, hope, and longing first take root. Then, in “The Place That Remembers Us,” she evokes the quiet endurance of bonds that, though softened by time, remain etched in the soul.
Together, these works offer contemplation on beginning again—whether with someone new, or entirely within ourselves.
Nancy is an award-winning journalist, author of a memoir, life coach, activist, and facilitator of creativity workshops. Over a four-decade career, she’s worked in three forms of media—print, web, and television. She’s also the creator of “Sunshine+Sarcasm” on Substack.
She shared a brief explanation of what inspired her to write this essay. “I grew up in a traditional Italian-American family, and the only thing expected of me was to marry and have kids. I did neither. They didn't understand my burning desire to go to college. I went anyway. Now in my sixties, I wonder about independence and love co-existing.”
“Is It Possible to Be Independent and Well Loved?” by Nancy Colasurdo
“Do you ever get bored?” my friend asked recently.
“No, I like my own company,” I replied.
I do. More than most people. It has, over the years, made me feel odd, outcast even. It took my mother a while to realize sitting on a lawn chair, reading Nancy Drew, was better than any activity she could push me to do with the kids in the neighborhood.
Independence has always been at the center of my life. Not consciously, mind you, but organically. I’m enormously proud of having it. As a navel gazer, solitary time is imperative to maintain my peace and my creative output, and of course carving out that space requires a certain level of independence.
I’m 63 and single. Perhaps that’s why this line about Eudora Welty captivated me in Fenton Johnson’s book, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life:
“She dedicated herself to the ideal of art over the compromise of marriage; to be vulnerable not to a particular individual but to the whole world.”
Ah, vulnerability.
Many would say I make myself highly vulnerable, almost to a scary level that has them wondering why, how. It’s admirable, they say, but also, is it too much? Those would be my readers. I live out loud for me and for them. Social media has only amplified the ways in which I can share. I’m not sure why this is who I am, but it assuredly is.
That other kind of vulnerability? You know where you share your life with another person? Now we’re in different territory. Fenton also speaks of this in his book, quoting Welty:
“I return to the hamlet where I grew up and I face many times the question I received at a high school friend’s funeral: Are you married? No? Ever been? No? Children? No? And in the triple negative I understand my place in this subculture, which is precisely and exactly no place.”
I don’t read this with sadness. It’s not negative for me. It used to be. I’ve come to embrace this societal sentiment because I have a rich life. That’s not to say I haven’t done things over the years to “partner”—i.e., online dating, fixups.
Recently I was looking for a photo and found one of me with friends taken in 2010. I look radiant. I was in love at the time. It both delights and galls me that you can tell because I’m so completely lit up.
Some people must be partnered. Their worth is tied to it. I’ve seen friends get divorced or widowed and immediately jump into another relationship. This isn’t criticism. It’s an observation that we’re cut from different cloth.
Perhaps it’s the artist in me standing up for her creative space and her trepidation at it being taken away. I think that’s always been my fear, somewhere deep down. That I would abandon my creative impulses for ga-ga love.
When I see that radiant photo of myself now, I wonder if indeed I could be both independent and well loved. I think I’m open to possibility. I think.
That guy I loved died in 2012. Am I still aching from being so tied to another human that way, perhaps not willing to risk that kind of vulnerability? I honestly don’t know.
He adored my writing. Respected it.
I don’t dwell on that, but I share it here because it seems pertinent. That was the essence of the dream. A guy who gets me on that level. My writing isn’t separate from me. It is me. I have a family I love dearly, but most of them love me despite my writing.
That guy, he dug my mind. Oh man. I couldn’t even function some days, such was my joy at being seen.
“How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved,” Sigmund Freud said.
I can feel that quote seeping through my body like liquid fire.
Does that love-based boldness come at the expense of independence?
“Here is a great secret, seldom acknowledged in popular culture: it is possible to be a solitary within a couple,” Fenton wrote. “In fact, the most successful couples of my acquaintance are composed of solitaries leading parallel lives, who understand both the rewards and responsibilities of being together and the rewards and responsibilities of being apart.”
It's settled. I will continue to be me. That option doesn’t bore me at all.
For more from Nancy visit:
Sunshine + Sarcasm on Substack
J.P. Holme is a writer exploring the creative journey in real time through fiction, poetry, and personal reflection. Her work often weaves themes of memory, identity, and emotional transformation. She shares her writing and process on Substack, inviting readers into the beauty and mess of becoming.
She wrote the following two poems after attending a poetry workshop, which challenged her to explore emotion through both immediacy and memory.
“The Beginning” captures the fragile, yearning spark at the start of love, when vulnerability and trust are still finding their rhythm.
“The Place That Remembers Us” is a reflection on love remembered, how something brief and youthful can leave a lifelong imprint, even as life moves on.
Together, they frame the arc of love: its awakening, and its echo.
“The Beginning” by J.P. Holme
Through beams of light, dance dreams and weary blissfulness. Through fingers intertwine, I looked to thee. My heart knows no bounds. And yet bounded within this body of mine do I feel your love. Trust me, love me. For what are clouds without sky to embolden them, and what to flowers without soil to ground them. Nourish my soul, and set me free, so I may come to know you better.
“The Place That Remembers Us” by J.P. Holme
Our names are still there carved in that tree at the edge of the world, where we once ran to hide, just you and me. We were young, too free, too wild for grown-up eyes to see as love. To them, we were only children, laughing like fools, believing we’d found eternity. But time, that quiet witness, held us to our vow. The tree still stands, aged and cloaked in moss, its bark worn, just like us now. I hear, from time to time, of your life your wife now gone, your grandchildren three. I smile and share our stories with my own, while my husband adds his memories beside mine. Still, I visit that tree. Run my fingers along those faded letters, our names once carved with urgency, now softened by years. And I know: not all love is meant to last, but young love pure, fearless can echo through decades, etched into earth and skin and soul. That place, that tree, still remembers you and me.
Explore more from J.P. on Substack
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