why the {caged} bird sings //cici; [blitz]

I find myself floating in that familiar void again, that odd feeling of detachment echoing through skin and bones that don’t feel all quite there. Instead, I feel numbness, chilled as though all the warmth in my body has seeped out of me and onto the soft bed of grass that seems to have slipped out from beneath me in a matter of secondshoursdays as I go spiraling down into a place so deep within me that any semblance of awareness flickers out like candlelight. I’ve been thrown into this empty sea too many times to count in my life time, but the familiarity of it does nothing to hinder the terror that courses in one quick burst through my veins before the void swallows up even that.

I don’t know how much time passes before I feel the spark, the gears in my head whirring to life and jolting me back to the present. (It feels like a lifetime, yet also just mere seconds – the doctors tell me that an average episode lasts around five minutes, though.) It’s not a slow process, waking up from my episodes – just as sudden and violent as they come on. All I know is that suddenly I’m warm again and I can feel and hear and smell the forest and my eyes snap open and I jump, startled back into awareness with a gasp, my heartbeat speeding up into a frantic drumming against the back of my sternum before settling back down into a semi-normal thrum. Forest colors swim in a blur before my eyes, and my fingers are oddly tingling – something that hasn’t happened before. Why are my fingers tingling?

That’s when I notice the unfamiliar shape sitting close beside me, and I blink to try and make out the features through the haze. At first, I think it’s just Sybil come to keep me company, but as my eyes begin to refocus I start to realize that the figure is too big to be a seven year-old, the skin too dark and hair too smooth, and she’s not humming me a lullaby. “Are you alright?” it says instead, and then I know it’s not the ghostly little girl that I’ve been hallucinating for past eight years. Sybil doesn’t speak, or sit close enough that I can smell the flowery scent of her shampoo, and Sybil definitely isn’t this…pretty.

No, this has to be a new hallucination. This girl can’t be real. There’s no excessive make-up, no gaudy clothes or crazy hair or over-powering perfume or any of those sickening Capitol “trends” leeching the natural beauty from her. And she is beautiful. I find myself staring at her wonderingly, reaching out to graze my fingers across the skin of her forearm, and the warm contact sends a jolting real into my thoughts. But she can’t be real. She’s too good to be true.

“What’s your name?” Curious, I reach up and run my fingers through her hair, a little taken aback at how strikingly soft and substantial it seems. This is by far the most vivid hallucination I’ve ever had, but I find that unlike the others I quite like this one. “You’re very pretty. Do you know Sybil?”