Lea Michele had her whole future planned with Cory Monteith. Though they weren’t engaged when he died in July 2013 at the age of 31, they were ready to spend the rest of their lives together, and had even talked about starting a family, she reveals in the new issue of Glamour UK.
“We talked about a lot of things. We talked about children and what we would look like when we grew old, and who would be fat and how we would stay thin,” Michele, 27, says of her late love and former Glee costar. “We talked about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do. We were done. We were it.”
“When you’re at that place in your life with someone, you talk about everything,” she explains. “But today I feel like I was given the best part of Cory, and I’m thankful for that.” She’s also thankful for a new year. “I feel physically and emotionally very strong,” the “Cannonball” singer tells Glamour UK.
“At the start, it’s hard because you’re so physically and mentally shocked and damaged, but after a while you get tired of physically feeling so horrendous,” she says, noting that yoga helped her cope. “Then gradually your mind catches up with your body.”
She continues: “Now I feel a little bit more back together and I have this blank canvas in front of me, which is what my life can be. There’s something sad about that but also something good, because I will take that blank canvas and make something beautiful out of it.”
For now, that “something beautiful” does not include romance. “I’ve only ever had serious relationships, so it’s an adjustment putting myself back into a place of being alone. And I was under a Cory Monteith spell…it’ll take time to readjust my mind, and I’m really not wanting to do that right now,” she tells the mag. “I feel like it’s so important to make sure that I’m 100 percent okay before I can get into a relationship. But people have to understand that I can’t be alone forever. Cory wouldn’t want that.”
Not that she has time for romance now anyway. Michele is currently busy promoting her debut album, Louder, which drops March 4. It includes the emotional track “If You Say So,” cowritten by the Glee actress about Monteith, as well as several other very personal songs.
“My main goal as an artist is to be truthful,” she told Us Weekly in a recent interview about the record. “I didn’t record anything I didn’t deeply connect to or feel was true to me. Whether I wrote it or not, everything I’m saying on this album is a part of me.”
“I was lucky enough to experience an amazing love, and I think that this album is really the story of my life over the past two years,” she added. “And when I listen to a song like ‘You’re Mine,’ it makes me so happy, it really does.”
