The Home of Forgotten Stories

Emotionally and psychologically, I feel like I’m a lot… softer… than I was when I was young.  Does this happen to everybody?

It’s not necessarily a bad thing; I’m much more compassionate than I once was.  But it certainly does make certain things more difficult.  I’ll give an example:

When my grandmother moved out of her old house (this would be about oh, twelve years or so ago), I inherited her two pothos plants. These plants are extremely hardy.  Evidence: one of them is still alive, in spite of the fact that I am not talented at caring for plants.  (I once killed a cactus by forgetting to water it.  Yes, I did.)  The live pothos is currently thriving on top of my kitchen cabinets.

The reason the other one of the two died is because I deliberately killed it.  It lived in my closet (my closet has a window) so that the cat couldn’t chew on it, and it did very well for a number of years, but for the past few months, it’s been turning brown all over except for a single green sprig.  So I decided to just stop watering it and close the blinds and let it die.

It spent weeks dying.  That thing clung to life like a sailor clings to a raft.  It took so long for that tiny green sprig to give up, that I finally just relented and opened the blinds again and gave it some water, but it was too late by that point.  The sprig wilted.

I put it in the garbage just yesterday.

I have been consumed with guilt ever since.  I killed something!  Deliberately!  By starving it to death!  It died alone, in the dark, without any way to explain or justify what was happening to it!  I’m practically in tears just thinking about it.

Twenty-five year old me would have just trashed the plant once it turned mostly brown and forgotten about it the next day.

At any rate, I don’t intend to ever do that again.  If I kill my one remaining plant, it’ll be by good plain forgetfulness, just like the good lord intended plants to die from.

It’s interesting to think how this is reflected in my recent writing. Am I capable of the casual brutality needed to kill off a character whose death is necessary for the plot? I used to be. Now, I’m not so sure.