jax dearheart {finished} district four

They say the grass is always greener on the other side but there's hardly any grass here at all - just rocks and sand getting eaten away by the sea and the wind. They carve away existence, little by little, watching as everything disintegrates against their forces over the years. (My patience is dragged along for the ride, too.) My sister says that the grass on the shores where everybody else lives is luscious in spring and tickles your feet in summer and snow-covered in winter and scattered with leaves in the fall.

I'd like to believe her stories whispered across the sea between our home and the shore, carried along in songs of sailors and twisted by her imagination into something beautiful. Some I do, some I don't. I hate the one of the siren on the shore who sends boys and girls to their frightful doom - it keeps me up at night tossing and turning like driftwood. I am more fond of the ones of hope, of redemption, of magic and monsters and saving the day. (I'd never dare admit it, but I love the tale of Peter Pan most of all.)

Peter Pan is a story my sister heard not too long ago of a boy who lives upon the shore and visits the lost children who live there in the dead of the night. I'd like to think that there is someone out there who would steal me away, a lost boy in a too-big house on the coasts of District Four. But I live in Panem and the only children that are stolen away do not live for very long afterwards. I'm awfully scared of the prospect of upsetting a monster disguised as a person or a pirate upon the sea, but I'm even more terrified of hearing my name (or my sibling's name) called across the District to sail to our deaths. Peter Pan is a myth to most, but every year as we traversed to the District Square I would catch a shadow in the corner of my eye and I knew. He danced in the floors of the crowd and disappeared again as feet trampled him away.

Over time I would find myself distancing from story books and fairy tales (although the Lost Boys would visit me in my dreams and steal me away for the night) and woke up buried in the pages of facts and fiction and logic. So desperate I was in succumbing to the sinking depths of truth that I drowned myself in it instead. Perhaps I thought I could counter-act the nagging in my brain that said there was no such thing as Peter Pan or Lost Boys or hope. The world was becoming darker and I was growing taller and the more I tried to hide in my imagination the more reality would rattle me awake from my dreams. But the shadows that dance in the corner of my eyes kept me dreaming, wishing, hoping.

A Peacekeeper once knocked on our door in the middle of the howling night and as my eyes flew open the Lost Boys flew away out of my window. "Hello sir," I greeted in a quiet confidence, afraid my siblings wake up and destroy the tender stalemate with their brash demands and youthful foolishness, "How may we help you this evening?" They speak of Jax Dearheart as always so polite, formal, etiquette of the highest degree. Wednesday laughs as loud as the stormy seas and is furiously grounded in her own head, whilst Moon falls over his own feet and gets back up again in a heartbeat. I smile politely and nod my head and let the world be. Sometimes I have to bite my tongue from snapping back at my siblings - and sometimes I'm too late. (There's bloodstains between my teeth and nails bitten down to the core. They say I'm too hard on myself - too stiff, too impatient. I disagree. I'm not harsh enough.)

When I look out of the window I long to see a world where we never have to face hardship. Where we don't have to grow up or learn that the facts upon a page are more important than the stories woven into the spine of children's stories. There is not enough right in this world. You can't poke your tongue out in winter to taste the snowflakes without a trace of ash falling from your mouth. You can't dip your toes into the ocean without them going numb. For every right deed there are a hundred cruel ones. And it hurts to see it, to feel it, to have it hang from your shoulders and drag you down. If I could change the world I would but I'm fifteen years old and have to read with glasses on and have trouble differentiating fact from fiction - what could I possibly do?

I could believe.

I still do. I think. There are times when I am bitter over Peter Pan and the lost boys. I fall asleep with my fists clenched and my jaw set, writhing in my dreams and waking up alone. How dare they spin such magical stories in a world so full of fear. How dare they leave me here and dance up there in the sky, laughing and cackling and mocking me. (Sometimes I'm so angry that I throw anything and everything at the wall, and again, and again. Afterwards I'll pick it all up and put it back in place like nothing happened at all. Anger is temporary. Pain is irrelevant.) I'll storm around the house with hunched shoulders and a wicked glare, burying myself behind a book as I curl up in a corner of this too-big house and fume, eyes glistening and mouth set in a line, until steam stops pouring from my tiny ears and my face turns from red to pink. How dare they, I think. How dare they keep me trapped here.

I still believe, after all this time. I painted colours across my fair skin and donned a crown upon my yellow head and laughed, googly-eyed through glasses, and chased shadow pirates away. Bouncing from bed to bed, we would swing our red-knuckled fists around and shout with joy and ignore the terrors outside. I didn't know that someday I would be too tall to jump, that my figure would shoot up and over the heads in my class and my frame would crouch below the ceiling. I didn't know my skin would sprout tiny red dots in odd places - above my eyebrows, on my nose, by my temple or my lips. I didn't know I would outgrow my clothes and find myself fitting my father's shirts far too early for my liking.

I didn't know that one day, I'd have to start growing up.