[Un]tethered // Justice Building (Open Blitz)

well he said "listen, listen,
i'm not afraid to go if it's with you
i was born to live for you"
and i'm like juliet, waiting to see the sunset on the rise
no goodbyes, i'd rather die

He walks into my arms and, in a fit of irony, I feel less than him. This is not numbness that consumes me, it is a moment of non-existence. My feet have fallen still, but my head is forever spinning, dizzy and dense with the future. Thoughts come with difficulty, as if I have short-circuited and blown a fuse within my brain. I have been overwhelmed by pride. Greed. Excitement. Adrenaline. Ambition. Yet, from the far side of the infinite distance that separates us, there is still an awareness that he is present... even if I am not.

Reigning myself in with a wanting that could almost be mistaken for needing, I attempt to send a message out across the divide. However, my body is nearly vacant and I am little more than an unskilled puppet-master. Lips parting, I exhale a soft shimmer of silence from my lungs, looking him in the eye and wondering if there's any way to explain how all of this is at once so easy and agonizingly difficult. The world is fragments of chaos and although I remain whole, my reflection is a failed puzzle that nags me with confusion. But I am impossibly far away. Unreachable, even as his arms wrap around me with defiance, as if to prove everything I know wrong. It is the kind of rebellion that could change a person if I were still the girl from this morning, before I became something more than myself.

As it is, I can only tug at my lazy mouth again, coaxing a few words and a crooked smile from it. "I'm not afraid." But, looking at him, it doesn't sound quite right, so I try again. "I'm not afraid of this." And the words still refuse to settle within me. "Of anything." Untruths I cannot name insistently nag at me (I might be more liar than human in this moment and my infallible honesty is so confused) until I swallow my missteps back, as if they could be unsaid, and discover something in my lungs besides accidental other-words. I say: "I'm not afraid to die." And that, if nothing else, is true.

glowing sun
now that you’re awake
everything seems different
i look around
but there’s nothing at all

It has been for always. This wraith twisting within me, teaching my bones defiance (the kind that disproves scientific facts about matter density or the velocity of existence) until I discovered and discarded ideas like breaking points. I know how to move past things in ways others cannot fathom and this has been true for longer than my memories can stretch — which, like the rest of me, is far, far, far...

Caught up in the most honest impulses of a dead man, he buries himself within me. Nose to neck, it is as if he is half-caught in confusion as to which myth of the persistent undead he might most personify: zombies versus vampires versus victors of Games he might come to hate me for playing. Exhaling as he breathes me in, for a long moment the air between us becomes a tide. Back and forth. Back and forth. Traveling the emptiness that spans from my moonface to the remnants of his sunfire skin — charred away until only the ink-reminder evidence of blackened bones remains, all murdered sensation and nerve-rot — we exchange breaths in the last uncertain moment of my life. Our time together is a purgatory of sorts. Something unknown and painful in the strangest ways.

Yet, I am still so faraway, a ghost of the girl he is clinging to. Over the years I have religiously devoted myself to the capabilities of my own body, selfish and reckless to the point of soul-abandon. More than the burns and gashes I have suffered in my attempts to truly discover myself, I have sacrificed so much more. It was never a lack of food or a bed to sleep in, but more the ability to understand humanity and connection. The Games have presented me with an opportunity to explain myself to the world, to show everyone everything that is the opposite of impossible. This has never been about life or death for me, not like with other Careers who dream of fame and fortune. I am a performer about to step into the spotlight of Panem's ultimate stage. There is nothing I have ever wanted more —

"You can't be dead too, that's my thing." As he speaks, it is as if he is scolding the smallest details of my body, freckles and every forgotten fragment I possess. These are pieces of myself I have ignored in favor of my grand, all-consuming dream and they shiver in the wake of his desperation. I am at least seven infinities away, but these trivial particles of myself that I have left behind are tugging at me, weak but unrelenting, begging me back to the now of things. "I'm afraid for you to die."

Snap back. My soul is thrown across the plane of existence with such violent force that I learn where shooting stars come from. Feel the ricochet of failure when a Peacekeeper's bullet misses its target. Come to an innate understanding with the trajectory of a dying bird caught in flight and unstoppably doomed to fall. Miles are rewound in a moment until I am no longer a future-mind with a past-body, but utterly present.

I have never feared death, but now someone fears it for me and I don't know what this means. There has always been a part of me that daydreamed macabre about how even my blood spatters will be artful should I fall, about the way my body will twist in one final arc of perfect grace as I collapse to the ground. I have always felt destined to become legend, something more than myself... but he doesn't want me to be more than myself. He is pleading with the parts of me that are less and his words declare freckles to be a valid reason for living, although they do not turn flips or breathe fire or astound. Impulse demands that I scream at him until he congratulates me for the honor of my fate, wants me to tell him off for insulting a lifetime of preparation.

Writhing against his touch, the perpetual motion machine of my body tick tick ticks with a rhythm it has never known. Always I have moved with a perfectly guided flow, liquid bones and muscles that know no bounds, but now I am all stutter-stop joints. My body resists itself. Tells me something is wrong. Argues over what that might be. The confusion manifests itself in every stopstartpause and I barely manage to press my forehead to his, staring him down with a burst of anger and a bloom of contradiction. "I refuse to be nothing." I search for the words, for every yes of my reasoning, and for the prideful euphoria I felt the first time I bent my spine so far backwards I touched my heels. "I want this." And there is something ferocious within me as I glare at him, pressing forward, skull to skull, as if demanding him to accept me for what I am. After all, that's what the two of us do. "I have always wanted this." I close my stubborn eyes and inhale with the thought, stealing his last breath into my lungs and keeping it there... because I'd be a liar if I pretended I didn't want that too.