Dahlia

All I wanted was to be a star. I wanted my name in shining lights and for people to gasp as I walked by. I wanted them to admire me, envy me. I didn’t want strange assumptions from people who thought they were better than me. I should have stopped people still in their tracks. I should have pressed my hands in the cement in front of Grauman’s like Irene Dunne did, flashbulbs popping, reporters shouting. So many handprints and footprints have come along since she pressed hers. Have I really been gone that long? Were the only flashbulbs the detectives documenting my demise?

It feels like a dream, but only in fragmented pieces. I live bits of my existence over. Like a moth I flutter to the good ones, the ones in the light. I stay far from the dark, the pieces I don’t wish to recall. I don’t need to. I’d rather forget them entirely. The further and longer I stay away from them, the more they fade away.

I know something awful happened to me. I know I became a spectacle, a curiosity. The longer my existence is merely just energy and shadows, the more my memories of my past fade. It’s been decades now. I stopped counting the years a long while ago. I don’t know if it’s been fifty or one hundred and fifty. I just know I’m dead. I have been for a long while. Yet somehow people still speak my name like a warning, though rarely is it my real name. The name they call me is merely a moniker or for what happened to me, a reference to a snapshot, a fleeting moment, the darkness that shrouded my story. There are people walking the earth who know more about me than I do anymore, who have studied me as a cautionary tale. I wonder if there are people who love me left, those who knew me even in passing, or if people just use me to scare their children into staying in their quiet towns and not chase their dreams.

I was in the papers… in the headlines. I know that. I know that because I wanted it so badly. I craved the stardom, the red carpets, the hairdressers and makeup, the hot lights and the reels of film. I wasn’t beautiful on the front cover, I was a mutilated monster who terrified toddlers and adults alike. I never got to be a beauty queen, just the queen of nightmares.

I remember pain. Pain that rippled through my body and penetrated my soul. Then a numbness. A darkness. It was as if I had fallen asleep in the bath and woke up under the milky rose scented waters. It sucked me down into the abyss that I exist in now. Wandering, wondering, waiting. I linger on in horror stories and shock pieces. My name dragged through new mysteries and stories caked in lies. Someone’s father supposedly knew me. I was born both a boy and a girl. I hear my name as a whisper in the winds and wonder what sort of macabre fairy tale they’ve invented for me now. I can’t remember my realities anymore, so they fill in the blanks I cannot. As the years tick by for the living, the more truth that lived within my existence fades.

I was once a daughter, a sister…. Someone with dreams long forgotten, aspirations ripped away and shattered. I live on in the shadow of my demise. Images of my death are still showcased as if I was just a bit of meat at the butcher, macabre collectors grasping for something that was once mine. I was human once, flesh and blood not yet rended apart. This soul deserving of love and respect, I was not—I am not an oddity to put on display. I am not just the Black Dahlia. My name was Elizabeth Short and I just wanted to be a star.