Dr. Dawkins
Creative Project Passing
24 March 2022
Dear Diary,
She’s dead. My beautiful, sweet, amazing, sugarpuff, sunshine-on-a-rainy-day, creamlicious, whatever-floats-your-boat-mantra, and carefree dandelion is gone. I really don’t know what happened. I just had to let it out – all that anger and rage. It couldn’t have been healthy to be bottled up like my little brother when he doesn’t get that double-chocolate fudge ice cream cone. He sits in the top left corner of the living room with his head swallowed under a million blankets. You can basically see the steam rising until he blows. No, I didn’t want to be him. I wanted to it my own way. Every day I would look at that girl and say “Wow, I wish that was me.” Now I don’t have to. I didn’t mean to hurt her – least of all kill her. We had gone through so much together. From waddling as toddlers to flirting with the high school football team, our adventures were typical but good. You know, she was never the one to listen to the rules. Once in elementary school, we had a Halloween party. She dressed up as a pit bull, and I think she believed she was one. That was until the chaperones had to tranquilize her due to the terrorized children in the gym. Yes, I smashed her. All that remains are a thousand pieces of littler “her.” The tiny glass fragments reminding me of what once was. I can’t look now, even if I wanted to. I’m beginning to think that maybe I didn’t kill her. Maybe I killed someone else.
With Love,
Irene
Analysis:
While I didn’t primarily focus on the theme of security, it was a quote pertaining to this theme that inspired the short diary entry. The author shows Irene, right before Clare’s death, pondering the state of security. Irene asks herself, “Security. Was it just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained" (Larsen 76)? Although Clare and Irene fluctuate from being at odds to one with each other, the ending demonstrates that they really are just two sides of the same coin and that there are some striking similarities between them. They both were willing to risk whatever it took to achieve security. For Irene, it was to control her life and her family’s. For Clare, it was to obtain deliverance from her “passing” Assuming that Irene had indeed murdered Clare, I sought to explore her thoughts after the book ended. Was security really worth the cost?
The setting and exact details of the characters could have changed between the original story and this diary entry. For example, Irene mentions a younger brother here, but the intent is the same. Using the implied metaphor of a glass mirror to represent Clare, I discovered that Clare and Irene were intertwined with one another. If anything, killing Clare only made Irene less secure due to the fact she had lost a part of herself. It may have been that Irene was frustrated by Clare reminding herself of her true nature and sought to silence that voice. Yet, without a reflection, how does she know who she really is? The idea that Clare and Irene are distinct people, but the same person leads to many other questions. Who really killed Clare? Was it Irene? Clare? Both? Or someone else?