Writing about The City of Lost Children and little girls’ notions of romance has made me think about a star-crossed love affair from my own childhood.
I thought I was over the loss, but I wasn’t. When what you had was a secret and what you lost equally secret, you don’t ever get to grieve.
To avoid grieving, I’d half-convinced myself I never felt the things I felt. When I finally acknowledged it, I was like Doubting Thomas, touching the wound in my own side for proof. I thought it would be unbearably painful, but it wasn’t. It turned out to be a relief and full of joy.
My Secret Twin
I thought I would never be able to do justice to the story. I thought I would not be able to reveal the Truth and have it believed. The man I loved is long dead and defenseless, and I feared it would open him to ridicule or blame or condemnation. As a writer, you can doubt your skills, but don’t doubt the power of your story to convey Truth to your readers. Stories carry themselves. The handful of people I’ve told the story to now…they understand in a way I didn’t really hope for.
I thought all secrets were bad. They’re not. Some are beautiful. Some are so beautiful you want to share them with people. Others are so beautiful you want to keep them secret.
If kept long enough, I assumed all secrets went one of two ways: dissolved like a baby tooth in cola or burst like a swollen appendix, leaking poison into your body. Many of them do, but others turn to scars, badges of honor on your skin. Others yet turn into fantastical things, like an absorbed twin encased within you. Strange, yes. Disturbing, yes. Still, somehow wonderful: a fellow traveler you’ve carried in your flesh.
Of this secret, I have wondered if it were a little bundle of hair and teeth, sealed up inside me, my fetus in fetu. Or perhaps it’s more that I’m a chimera. The only thing left of that younger me is her blood running in my veins.
Bryn Greenwood 
Sounds like the opening chapter of a novel…. 😀
Yes…my reverse Lolita novel. 🙂
Fetus in fetu….fetucini. I am imagining myself having so many younger secrets that perhaps I might rival Octamom in the absorbed sibling category.That is shitloads of teeth and wads of hair.
I always loved the idea of being taken away, perhaps on a big black horse by a burley ogre with a strong and manly build. Other attributes I still seek out that are perhaps a little Cro-magnon, yet gently giant at the same time.
Like lusting for fear but being protected by somebody consumed by me. “I can face anything as long as you are here to beat the shit out of anybody that comes near me”.
My first love, a man, was 40 and I was 18. It didn’t last but the beginning and middle were stupendous. The end, a bit bloody. When it ended it did so like a cherry bomb. Once the noise ended and the smoke cleared the danger had passed.
Danger always makes things sexier.
Wow, Myke. It’s like you’ve lived my little secret memoir, except the big black horse was an Indian motorcycle and I was a bit younger than 18. 😉
“The only thing left of that younger me is her blood running in my veins”
Technically, no. Your blood is replaced at regular intervals by your body. So close though… LOL
It is an amazing and wonderful story – and this is a beautiful post.
Ah, but Kzinti, “brain cells” or “bones” is so much less poetic, and aren’t they the only part of me that hasn’t sloughed off and been replaced in 24 years? Besides which, that misses the point of “chimera.” If she’s my chimeric twin, I’ll always have her blood in my veins.
Lisa: thanks for reading and understanding. It’s scary to share a thing like that and not know what the reaction will be.
Seems like I”m always agreeing with otherlisa!
It is an amazing and wonderful story…and you really do convey the truth without pulling any punches, sugar coating anything or using hyperbole. You are quite brilliant.
Very well said, and such a beautiful post. I think a lot of the time we feel obligated to turn the events of childhood and adolescence into moments of great drama or trauma, just because that’s the way it’s done these days, when in fact that makes less of what these moments were to us.
*salutes*
Dana: You’re making me blush. I hope I can get half that reaction with what I do with fiction.
Amy: It is a cultural trend, isn’t it? To make all our past secrets in these dark clouds, when sometimes even the traumatic stuff was good for us in the long term.