Page 74 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
I go downstairs, back into the living room. That broken vase is still there. I wish I could forget something. I wish I could forget one moment of our time together. I wish that I could forget how I feel alive when I’m with him, and how terrible and dry and pointless everything feels when I’m not.
I wish I could go back to being the good, overachieving girl who wants nothing more than to succeed at her art.
I sit down on the couch, and I put my face in my hands.
Why do I want him so much?
Why do I want the darkness?
I think about my painting. About the paintings that I’ve done of him, and how different they are to everything else I’ve ever done. The paintings that I did while I was in the attic.
The truth is, the work that I’ve done with him, in the depths of my misery without him, those paintings are better than anything I did before, which were more about wanting to be good, and not about wanting to express a feeling. But I hate the idea that perhaps I simply need a broken muse to make art.
Any therapist would say that’s a terrible thought. An artist doesn’t need to be tormented in order to produce good work.
They certainly don’t need to be in an unhealthy relationship in order to do it.
And yet, he calls to a part of myself that I never acknowledged before I met him. Sexual. Imperfect. Dramatic. Wild.
Joyful.
Because the truth is, while I’ve had a perfectly happy life, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt anything big, all-consuming. Nothing other than the need to succeed, the need to be perfect. The need to make my parents proud. And none of that was ever really about me.
It was about the way that other people saw me.
In his arms, for the very first time, I simply felt my feelings.
Understanding the gifts that I’ve gotten from him don’t make me feel better. They make me feel worse, in fact. Because it makes me feel like he was giving more than I realized.
I made it sound like he never gave me a thing. Like he never did anything other than hurt me, and that isn’t true.
I hear footsteps behind me, and I turn. There he is, looking wounded, which was nothing I ever thought I possessed the ability to do to the great Dragos.
“I hurt you very badly,” he says.
He did, it’s true.
“Remember you asked me if I slept with him?” I ask.
“Yes, I remember that, it happened only a few minutes ago. I’m not forgetting what we’re experiencing now, and I think you know that.”
“I don’t know how your amnesia works.” I sigh. “It made you want to kill somebody.”
“Yes. Though, not somebody. Him.”
“I understand that.” I sit there for a long moment. “I convinced myself that you were sleeping with another woman. Perhaps more than one other woman. But you were distant from me before I left. And I would love to say that I left because our communication was dysfunctional, but some of it was that a lack of trust invaded me. Once I started thinking that you weren’t having sex with me as often because you were with someone else I couldn’t let it go.” I stare at the wall, because I can’t look at him right now. “I wanted to kill her. Whoever she was. I don’t like that part of myself. I don’t like the intensity, I don’t like…” I close my eyes. “But it’s always been there. I just pushed it into my drive to succeed. You actually make mefeelit. In real time. Not just this deferred daydream of things that I hope I do with so much fervency that I forget to live in the moment. With you, I’m always in the moment.”
“We sound exhausting.”
I laugh and laugh and laugh. It’s not funny, but it’s true. So very, painfully true. “We are. We are terribly exhausting.”
“I’m sorry.”
I want to melt into his arms. And what if I do? He’s my husband. What if I melt into his arms and let him hold me? What if I let him kiss me? I’m stuck with them either way. We are stuck here. Except… I need to keep my distance from him. I need to prove that I have some sort of strength.
Just to myself.
I stand up, and I began to walk toward the kitchen, but he reaches out and grabs my arm. “Stay here. Are you hungry? I will get you something to eat.”
