Page 100 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
The artwork she’s done is truly stunning. Idyllic images of home. But there is something dark underneath the surface. For those that have experienced home in a manner that didn’t mean safety, these paintings of houses on manicured streets, family dinners, create a sense of disquiet.
It is exceptional, I think. The emotion that she has packed into these pieces.
The pieces by her friends are good. But they are nothing in comparison to what she’s done.
Perhaps I’m biased. But I don’t think so.
I take her hand, and when the band starts playing I pull her in for a dance. We’ve never done things like this. She looks up at me, delighted. I twirl her, and she comes back to me. I hold her against my body, and I feel my heartbeat quicken.
We can’t stay away from each other. In an ideal world, perhaps we might’ve abstained while we worked on our relationship. But for us, this physical connection is so much a part of who we are, that even when we try to keep our distance, we can’t.
But there are moments like this, which feel different. This romance. I experienced it for the first time with her. I remember when we went to France, and I got to watch her experience Paris for the first time. She loved it. She fell in love with it while she fell in love with me, and I hoarded all of those good feelings to myself.
But I didn’t want to give them back.
Because that felt frightening. As I hold her close against me, nothing feels frightening.
She looks up at me. “What are you thinking?”
She would think that my thoughts were absurd. “I was thinking about how my feelings for you frighten me.”
There. I said it. I’m honest. For perhaps the first time. In my life, the life that I experienced with my father, there was never any room for fear. It wasn’t an acknowledged emotion.
Such a strange thing, to live beneath the iron fist of an awful man, and to never be given a vocabulary for the wrenching terror that you felt.
Because a man was never afraid, and I was never a child. I was only ever supposed to be a man.
Telling her now that I’m afraid of anything… It’s like peeling off a layer of skin.
“Me?”
“Yes. Because I don’t know how to hope for anything good. I don’t know how to hope for anything softer, lovely. I don’t know how to hope for us. I was never given a framework for that. I was never given… A path toward hope at all. I wonder now if I had known what it would be like to try and hang onto this sunshine if I would’ve done it.”
“Is it too difficult for you?” She asks this with a soft, husky voice. I can tell that right now she’s afraid too.
“It might be. But I want it.”
So she clings to me, and we don’t talk anymore. It’s time for everyone to be seated for the auction. But ahead of the auction, three brave women stand up to tell their stories.
They are ugly stories. And I am bruised by each and every one of them. More than that, they remind me of things I’ve left in dark spaces inside me.
Memories I wish hadn’t returned.
I am left with my own brokenness. I despise it.
As each woman talks, I remember cowering as my father kicked me. Hit me. I remember saying the wrong thing, and not understanding why my mother’s face went from something placid to something filled with rage. Slapping me. Yelling at me. Telling me that I’m worthless.
Both my mother and my father hurt me, but in different ways. My father told me that I had to be ruthless. That I have no emotions. That I feel no pain. He told me that I was strong.
My mother told me that I was the worst thing that ever happened to her. That I was small and pointless.
Somewhere in there, is me. I am neither of the things my parents wished for me to be, or accused me of being. I’m just a black hole of pain. The place where my mother poured her helpless rage at being stuck in a relationship with a man who would ultimately take her life. The place my father sought to make an image of himself.
And none of it was ever about who I was. None of it was ever about what I wanted, or what I could become.
I am shaped by violence. And I don’t know if I can ever be made into a different form.
The auction begins, and they start with art by Cassandra’s friends, and I take that moment to leave the room.
