indiana woodards ✿ d8

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INFORMATION

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BIOGRAPHY

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My fingers are ice and my veins are fire. My mind is a jar of glitter and it looks like the galaxy, only it's filled with craft glue. Sticky, sticky, sticky. When footsteps come from my feet it sounds like rain, only the kind of rain that falls in the middle of the night when you are on the verge of sleep and you can't hear anything else but the sound of yourself breathing. And sometimes I have sentences that I can't hold in my hands or feel in my mouth and they run, run, run, run, so far and over the hills and they taste like flowers. There are stars falling out of my eyes. They land on the tiles in front of me and crack in two, in four, in eight. They splinter and shatter and crack like the bones in my sister's arm the time she turned too many wonky pirouettes in a row.

They keep dying, dying, drying, drying out like bones left on the sidewalk all summer, picked clean by foxes and left, unable to rot because they are much, much too white. Shiny, like the reflection of mirth on my windowsill, you see. It's the screen, the box, square that we watch them on, we watch them die. One after the other, like counting sheep, only they do not fall asleep, not ever again. It takes two to tango only sometimes the feet get caught up together in the dance and they tumble right over. And that is what happened to the Woodards, all of them, because we are an army of terrible mistakes. Criss, cross, criss, cross. 

Doubt is a bad, bad, word, and yet it is all we have. They call names, take turns, one at a time please. Keep your arms and legs inside the vechile at all times because oh, boy, this is a ride. Smells like a rollercoaster, only joyride is wrong. Because they die, die from this, all of them slit their wrists. Someone else pulls the trigger but we dig our own graves. It might be blood loss or fire or a Victor with a bright heart but either way we are asking for it. Gaps, gaps, gaps. I don't know what happened in between. I was watching, my eyes were fixed on the television screen but I saw something else, something different. Colours, colours like apples and oranges but also colours like lipstick and puke. And I woke up and they were waving in my eyes. "Hello, face, hello, Indiana." 

I wept because I did not see her fall. Always there are these blank spaces and my life is a puzzle. If I think very, very hard sometimes I can work it out but the answers, they are one of two things and I never know which, no matter how much counting I do. The ink in a ball-point pen is a lie. Hope either died because we forgot to keep believing or because Panem hates happy little girls with big futures and I can't ever know, but it's only one. Every single time I forget there is a darkness in my mind, like a piece of paper with nothing written on it. And I scrawl markings in pencil in the corners 'Rubik didn't go home' and 'my brother hates celery' and yet they don't add up, they are not a multiplication or a subtraction or a division but an infinity of possibilities and for this reason I hate life.

Straight lines are pretending to be something they are not. I myself am a scribble upon a good copy of a book report. I am when the pen runs out and you cannot be bothered to find a new one so you scrawl violently, as though you can channel your anger through the tip of a writing implement and all it does for you is ruin what you have created. I am forgetting where you put your keys and getting locked outside your house. And then of course it begins to snow, and I am not a horseshoe because I am not lucky and nobody has ever trodden on me even though I keep under their feet all the time, begging them to spell things out, slowly, simply, because my mind is rushing, rushing, rushing and they are moving like snails in an arms race. 

They shout when I tap, tap, tap on the counter-top but I cannot keep still. My arms and legs love to move because they think they are a puppet. And when I smell pancakes, they bake in the kitchen, I run in the other direction because I don't want to be flat on a plate and eaten, I want to be in the sky like a cloud. Rain falls and the clouds go away even though I shout at them, shout that I want them to stay and play. They don't like me. Nobody does. Like maybe standing too close to me will make them catch whatever is wrong in my mind but no, no, no, I am just a butterfly without wings. And that is not a whimsical, romantic belief, that is a sad, sad ending to the life of something that began as a caterpillar anyway. Don't question me. 

When I was little they used to take me to the doctors and make me sit in front of him. Fix me, fix me, fix me. Like tools in a toolbox, bring them out and build a house with my mind. But he pointed to colours on a chart and asked me to name them. I said 'lampshade' and 'mermaid' and 'hologram' and he laughed and nodded and said 'she has a wild imagination'. I wanted to scream and shout and tell him that inside of my mind wasn't simply wild, it's a jungle, the wilderness, a volcano, and it might just erupt at any moment. I can't navigate because my hands tell me what things taste like and my nose says the colour of knowing and my mother says feelings shouldn't have colours anyway and the doctor laughs and I close my mouth for all of four seconds. But then I can't keep the words in anymore because my brain is spinning like a top and they are pouring out of my mouth and forgetting, forgetting, forgetting is green.


Doctor says write a diary. Diary says I may not. That there is no way my hand could move fast enough to translate my musings into words. And I don't know words anyway, I can speak them but the letters and the numbers should not be mixed together. They rearrange themselves on the page like tiny ants bringing crumbs home to their Queen. I am not the Queen of my own words, they live an independent life and I think I might as well let them, for who am I to be the ruler of little souls with seven toes. And because of this sometimes I climb the tree in our garden at midnight and I shout and shout and shout and shout and shout and shout and shout and shout...
they tell me I am bad. 

But I do not think that I am bad. I think that I am lost. 

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COMPLETE

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