olete bene ~ district 9

olete bene

There’s a mirror in your room.

Solitary, it stands by the window you’re not allowed to open. You never used to look into its reflection much, would rather be distracted by flowers and pretty dresses and the innocent playthings of childhood five-year-olds are supposed to be transfixed by.

But then, one morning, you open that forbidden window because you’ve grown out of all your dresses and broken all your toys and even though the wilting flowers remained it wasn’t enough for you. And the mirror’s gathered dust in the corner and even though your mother cannot stop your wandering hands from seeking out the sunlight into the future she can sit you in front of that mirror.

For hours.

And hours.

And hours.

And oddly enough, you don’t mind this kind of solitude.

Because even though the world beyond that window is cracking and the echoes up the stairs tell you that, ‘outside is evil, outside is wrong,’ and the flaws you always found in the strands of matted hair framing your face are slowly being drowned you could find a new world of beauty, a world where you could reach into the mirror, feel the cool glass send shivers down your spine as you brought handfuls of stardust into your lap, finding hidden secrets in tiny particles, so small that without their flickering lights, they’d be lost to the world already, in all their miniscule entirety.

You found stories in the mirror – a friend when the rest of the world was not. It told you lies, promised perfection, because that’s all you’d ever been taught to believe.

Until you grew up.

Now, it’s just a mirror that stands by the window you live out of, and it scares you to look into it after so many years and see nothing more than

a shell.

It leaves you speechless each time.

The sun never seems to stay out for long – only times when it summons the courage to peek out from behind silver curtains mum always insists on keeping drawn. But I like the world better that way, shrouded in the glossy sheen of the rain and downcast splendour of a wistful way to live.

Everything is too bright otherwise. We live in a paper house and each time the flick of a light coming to life echoes through the origami walls I wonder how we haven’t burned to the ground yet, and when that day will come.

Two souls in a house of three work to keep our dollhouse untouched; they told me it was the garden that gave us such sanctity, but I’ve ventured around every corner of our wooden home’s outskirts enough times to know you will never find nothing more than creeping vines and thickets overrun by florae – unpruned, untrimmed. An untamed world, clustered and out of place in our tiny part of Panem, where the petals of the poppyflowers making their home in the dry earth are pressed into scrapbooks and photoframes, their stems stifled between glass vases set atop glass tabletops. I’d always loved the scents they brought with them – every week, something new. ‘Acclimatization to change,’ mum called it.

I told them I liked the geraniums best; my room is a shower of red.

I like living beneath the blankets of my bed. They aren’t too different from the folds of the world, brought down like wool over my eyes. It’s cooler, there, and in that faint darkness it’s easy to forget the feeling of that same dark translucency in my eyes, in the bags under my eyes, in the shadows of my cheekbones beneath the bags under my eyes. Within that world, everything seems a little easier to mend.

My parents hate broken things. They long for a perfect world, always insisting on fixing the damaged souls that come and go through the side door they keep hidden from me, even though I found the entrance eleven years ago.

They hate broken things, but in truth, I think everything is a little broken. I don’t mean broken in the way that the hairline fractures in my tired bones are going to develop into irreparable stresses if mum doesn’t stop pretending like they aren’t there. I mean like drowning. I mean like half the people in this world are craving the worst kinds of sins just to keep their heads above water. I mean like the way that, for a while there, the sunshine was nothing more than a fleeting myth until a curious girl drew the curtains on the painted windows of her fairytale home and her ivory skin felt the warmth she’d never known existed.

I mean like children so broken they’re swallowing their cries for help, adults so broken they’re choking on the fears they can’t pronounce, and those are the stories of broken dreams we’re so determined to sweep underneath the carpet in our living room when the side door closes and there are three of us once more. They do less harm there, is what my parents tell me.

They keep their work from me; I steal the tales they whisper through the pop-up doors in the hallways, sell them to travellers in tiny boxes adorned with crème-coloured ribbons, taloned fingernails tying fables together with a small smile.

It wasn’t always like that.

It wasn’t always so secretive.

It was simpler, when I was younger. The parcels I prepared held tiny trinkets found from hidden nooks of our nest – buttons, matchsticks, paperclips. Harmless notions of childhood innocence, wrapped in bows and polka dots like the ones on the dungarees I longed to live out of eternally. Passed to bleary-eyed customers as they left through the side door, as I stood in the shadows. The contrasting darkness always made it easier to visualise the light passing across their faces for a brief part of time, when their hands briefly touched mine and felt an answer to their stresses in the elegant ribbon. Gifts, carefully plucked, yet always discovered to be missing, and whilst they didn’t believe in punishments – whether it didn’t fit within the sacred code of porcelain living, or whether mum and dad simply had too many issues of their own to hide away I’m still not sure – the weeks of solitude locked within a shoebox between four paper walls were enough to remind me of their fantasy rules they insisted we follow.

The floors became paper, too, and it wasn’t so difficult to navigate the hallways when I travelled with the footfalls of a ghost.

It was simpler, when I was younger. Too young to distinguish the burdens of those visiting strangers from the affairs of my parents’ own rotting hearts. They keep everything from me; I steal the screams that sweep through deserted hallways, fumble for a pencil to write down a new tragedy, add it to the growing pile of loose sheets of paper nobody ever touches, and neither do I.

I grew older as they grew careless; forgetting to shut the doors that always remained closed, cooking the same meal two nights in a row. ‘Rules govern lives,’ but I watched them all fall apart, our dollhouse crumbling before their glazed eyes. Salvaged boxes piled up in my cupboard – they remained empty for many years, until the words through the walls were no longer whispers floating on the wind. Until the disjointed phrases caught up with me and the days I’d wake up smouldering made it harder to pretend I didn’t see the fading glamour of those carefully moulded corridors. Young faced, fresh eyed, desperate to see the stars and moon through more than just a glass pane, the boxes began to fill once again – confiscated keys to nullified homes, loose leafs of paper engraved in a cursive handwriting with addresses passcodes truths secrets I’ve seen bring the lost back to a place they belong. Sins so great they can break any man just as easily as they were once mended. Months of solitary scolding fuelled deals with adrenaline, made the flight exhilarating. It was easier to fade into the walls of what was once a dollhouse of grandeur when there were no longer any secrets held within them other than my own.

Now, it’s nothing more than a fallen castle.

Dad says he hates looking into my eyes. Whenever he catches my brown-eyed gaze, it’s always him to pull away first, for within them was a sister we never got to see grow up. ‘Not my fault,’ I was told time and time again, but losing a daughter who never was threw a spanner into the works of their perfect production about what life should be. I reminded them of their brief failure; it became easier to deal with when I learnt to cast my gaze away, too. My averted eyes proved invaluable for keeping the secrets stowed away in my heart.

It still hurts.

Lost love letters and whispers through the nights were sacred to Panem’s broken souls. People crave secrets – humans feed off of the unknown, the seemingly unattainable, until it is theirs. Hungry, they latch to the captured words. Snapshots in time. Tearing at crème-coloured ribbons and pressed flower petals, taloned fingernails tying fables together with masked malice, they are hungry. They need more. It’s an unbroken circle. It’s always the same.

They never cared much for the geraniums.