harper cross {eleven} finished

"i am weakness
i am greatness."
- don't give up on us, the maine.

I breathe in the summer sun and exhale bruises. My tongue is the colour of blood underneath my skin, it catches the taste of dirt in the air. Eyes scrunch up, mouth screws sour. The wind singers float past my ears and push me forward. They breathe, Go on, and life bursts through me.

I stumble forwards into laughter. There are others here, their skeletons dancing in front of me, grass tickling feet and every single one of our toes. Somebody once told me that we are all souls, trapped inside of bodies, and when we die our souls just evaporate like puddles of rain and we float, invisible, up into the sky. I rather like that idea, so I smile. The sunlight tugs at the corners of my mouth, the space in-between my ears following my arms that are raised up towards the blue and white above me, stretching up on my very tip-toes. If I evaporated now, I wouldn't mind it so much. I'm warm and cold all at once - goose bumps fading from my skin as the last of the day chases the moon behind the skyline. Go on, I think. Catch up.

Bare feet find the ground again and again. Hair turns gold in the milliseconds between its departure from my head and its safe arrival. In the blink of an eye it switches back to brown as the softest touch I will ever feel against my skull kisses me a million times over. We run, our faces to the wind, and I'm not held back by anything or anyone. (I think I hear a "Harper, you'll catch your death" in my mother's voice, but it's just the trees sighing and twigs crackling underneath my feet.)

I raise my branches once more and laugh. Freedom is not easy. Trees, as close to the sky as they are, are bound to the earth by roots. They cannot live without them - cannot breathe. I'm not a tree, I'm too small. (Arguably still a little girl - but I beg to differ. We stop pretending on our 11th birthdays, and by the 12th we've got hundreds of circles inside of us, marking the wisdom that falls upon us once a year when we live another, and another, and another day older.) Little girls laugh and little girls run around in circles underneath the sun and little girls breathe in air. Spindly bodies easily breakable, bones that will someday disintegrate into the earth like dust and dirt and float about the air once more.

Feet patter onwards and you stay behind, watching us run. I've got roots and I've got wisdom - etched across my face at the corners of my eyes and floating underneath the surface of my skin in blue and purple and lodged between quiet lips that don't like to open much, but I'd like to be a little girl against the breeze every now and again.

Lungs breathe. Chests sigh. I clasp at the air with bitten-down nails and dirt-engraved fingers. You let me go, the colour of the dried up summer fields bursting around me. Quietly, I disintegrate. So small, so slowly, so incredibly subtle that it'll take years and decades and perhaps even a century for me to completely vanish. Death will come when I finally clutch hold of it in my palms and it pulls me up into the sky, leaving my roots to turn into rust and dust.

Unless it catches me first.

-

She calls me a fool as I struggle to breathe. Inhale, exhale. Since when did simply living become such a challenge? Maybe I am a fool. I'm tricked by my own self-confidence, deluded by hope conjured up by words like progress and believe and possibility. Those are words silently forbidden to be uttered in an unspoken treaty across the country. Learning to button your lips is something you're fed with baby food, but I spent a lot of time learning to breathe as a child. Maybe the water in my lungs flooded into my ears and I deluded myself into thinking I drowned out those teachings. Maybe that's why we hear gasps at reapings instead of cries. We're all struggling to breathe, struggling to believe our own ears.

I think - no, I believe, because believe is an assertive word in which I can ground my feet firmly into and furrow my eyebrows in certainty - that I'm an optimist. All the patting at my head in the world can't change that. Dainty words are painted against my skull in attempts to let them sink under my skin. The wind sweeps them away and I patter back home unaware of any changes in me. Hands so small as they gripped onto life and struggled onwards all those years ago cannot remember what it was like to cling to life.

When you're in pain, you don't remember what living was like without it - yet the moment your body is at peace with itself, pain seems like a distant memory that won't ever return. My parents warn that at any moment I could wake up in panic, cheated by my own optimism. My body would forget how to breathe. Fingers tap them on the nose and correct them with a smile. "No, it could forget how to breathe." When I was small, they'd had only 16 seconds experience trying to keep me alive. But I've been breathing for 16 years and only I can feel them beneath my fragile ribcage, only I can understand, only I can seem to hold everybody else's' heavy hearts up with my own gushing confidence. Heaving underneath my heart, my lungs expand and collapse to their own rhythm. They kept me alive, even when liquid poured into them and threatened to drown me from the inside-out, I survived.

I never learnt how to swim in a lake, but diving into the brink of survival is almost second-nature. Sometimes I think I hear them crackling from the weight of the world on my chest. Ash collects at the back of my throat and I splutter it out in empty coughs and heaves of oxygen. Mom shoots a warning glance but I sweep her worries underneath the rug with my ashes, stomping them down. I could be cheating death, or luck, or maybe I'm just too damn good at conning my own worries in denial. My recklessness is suffocating. Coughs can't kill you - but little strips of paper can. Better to worry the one day it matters than spend the rest of the year not living every day as if it were your last.

Because for me, it might just be.

-


I was sick. I was dying - a second away from death. And then, miraculously, I lived.

I then proceeded to spend my days as bright as I could be, forever the optimist hiding her worries away for a rainy day. White noise pounds at the roof for hours on end. Droplets of water slide down the panes of glass and tiptoe across the garden leaves. Liquid lungs never leave me. I breathe in the smell of rain and tilt my head back - laughing, of course. Sometimes I drag people into the storm, giggling as the rain falls down my neck like the rivulets on the window panes. "Come on," I beam. "Catch up." Even in the darkest days where the sky grumbles, I light up like lightning and prance around in the cold until my body absorbs the thunder in the sky and refuses to stop shaking.

"You'll catch your death" they scold. I roll my eyes and chatter through my teeth. I've already caught death before, scars littering my palms from where it made its mark. Life line, Heart line, Health line, Fate line. My own broken constellation. Stopping and starting, it seems that when I was created they weren't quite sure about how my life would be foreseen. Nobody's quite sure now, not even I. But if that means I've got to create my own life, my own heart, my own health and my own fate by joining up those lines with memories and whatever happiness I can find in this miserable District, then so be it. I will grasp life with both disjointed palms and go down swinging.

When I was smaller and the days were longer, Dad would place me on the seat next to him for safekeeping. He drives trucks of produce to the trains, so all our hard work can be shipped off to people who don't really need it. Too young to understand why we weren't allowed to just drive the truck all the way home again, I would watch the world blur around me and smile. For a moment, the greens and browns and flighty shafts of blue would cloak me and my father in safekeeping. Nothing could touch us, nothing could hurt us. Short words were exchanged between him and the scary-looking man in white armour. I smiled at the important-looking man, uneasiness blossoming on his face. Such simple, youthful kindness did not seem to cross his path often. I sat in silence on the way home, upset not that he didn't smile back but that he was so deprived of simple pleasures as a smile.

"Why are you so quiet, Harp?" I didn't respond, just watched my green and gold world speed away from me. A hand found my forehead as if it could see the labyrinth beneath my skull, let it crumble away and reveal the intricacies of my mind. "Are you sick?"

I had to open my mouth then and assure him I wasn't. He carried me into the house, tapped me on the nose and said "Harper Cross, today I will teach you how to light a fire." It crackled in my ears and sparked dangerously close to my face, but I wasn't scared. Smoke billowed through the chimney and through my nose, coughing it back up again. With every nervous glance my parents exchanged, I pretended not to notice.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

"and they will all agree
that i'm a suffocator."
- daughter, smother.