All the Dead Darlings I Used to Be

Sometimes the darlings that are hardest to kill are actually parts of ourselves.

Admittedly, “darling murder” has never come easily to me. Half the point of sitting down to write in the first place was the picture I could pull kicking and screaming from my imagination — the colors, flavors, and textures I could add to what I was saying through the words I chose. But, like many overzealous artists, I always did tend to use too much paint in shades that were way too bright.

The written darlings I’ve killed over the years were more than clusters of words to me. They were little pieces of the adventures I’d go on in my head — pet snapshots left out of the photo album despite their importance to me. But they had to go for the good of the narrative as a whole.

That’s how I’ve felt about the process of changing as a person over the years, as well. Some of the faces I’ve worn over the years served me better than others. But in retrospect, I realize the greater narrative of my life is probably stronger without them. After all, nothing (and nobody) lasts forever.

She was seven. She’d just told her parents she didn’t believe in Santa Claus, and now her mother was in tears. The girl realized she had broken something in her mother’s fragile picture of how things should be — the first of what would turn out to be many somethings — but she didn’t understand how. Seven had always been told that magic wasn’t real, so she didn’t get how not believing in a being as utterly ridiculous as Santa had “ruined Christmas”, as her mother had put it.

But she wanted to fix it, so she told her mother a lie. She said she had only been kidding and that she believed, just like all the others kids. She even sat on the lap of a strange man in a red suit the next day, told him what she wanted for Christmas, and pretended not to be bothered by the acrid stench of his whiskey breath. And she knew that was the right choice when she saw her mother smile with approval.

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