Page 78 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
Like it still knows that I love Cassandra.
But what is love?
I have not asked myself that question even one time since my head injury. Instead, I’ve just been confident that the thing that I felt when I first saw her was love.
How could it be anything else?
Yes, I have felt confident in that. But what is it?
A flash and an image assault me. My mother. I know it’s my mother. Lying on the kitchen floor, looking up at the ceiling sightless. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t breathe. There is blood.
My stomach turns violently.
What is love?
I see my father, staring, without tears, without emotion, as we watch her coffin being lowered into the earth.
What is love?
The coffee finishes brewing just as I feel like I might be violently ill. And right then she comes down the stairs.
I see her, but now it feels complicated. Cluttered by this memory of my father. I can almost feel the ice radiating from him in that memory.
The lack of feeling. For me, for the woman that’s being lowered into the ground.
“Are you feeling all right?” she asks me.
“No,” I say. I have no capacity to live. I don’t know enough.
“You probably need to sleep. We should have brought someone with us…”
“We don’t know who we can trust. I don’t know what’s caused this, because I don’t know—”
I have another memory then.
I want out. Completely. I have to detach myself, my name from all of this.
Do you think it will clean the blood off of your hands?
No. The blood goes back generations. It will always be there. But it must stop.
I’m speaking to someone else in the memory. And that man is talking about blood on my hands. I look down like I might see it there.
“Dragos?”
“I have been remembering some things this morning.”
“Oh.”
“My father killed my mother. I told you that,” I say.
That pulls me away from that more recent flash of memory, back to my childhood. Back to those two things that I saw. I know that what she said is true.
“You told me that recently,” she says.
“I told you the truth. I can remember… Finding her. They say that you repress traumatic memories. Why is it that that’s the first one to return to me?”
“I don’t know,” she says. Her voice is gentle, compassionate, and that makes me feel like the situation must be dire. Because she has seemed halfway angry to have to deal with me from the first moment I can remember, so her pitying me feels like a bellwether for tragedy.
