annemie yille | d6 | FIN

Staring into the mirror with your bouncy brown eyes, you take a look at yourself. They scan over your face and body, picking up every fragile little detail you have gained throughout your years on this world. The darting comes to a stop, and you focus on the shape of your face. It’s pretty average, just like most things about you – but something about your face makes you smile. Whether it be your dirty blonde (almost ginger) hair, or the smile that is reflected into the pure sheet in the mirror. There’s something about it – there’s something about you.

And so your eyes begin to dart around again, except this time: they focus on your body. It’s as if your face has been erased with the gentle swipes of a rubber and it’s swept away and you are left with the skeleton that is your body. And a skeleton is all you are. Peel back the hundreds of layers of skin, and rip off the muscles – we’re all the same. It’s your habits that make you different. Upon becoming nervous, you rub away at your hands, meaning that over time they’ve become a burning red. After all the time you've been doing this, they've become scarred - the tissue has teared and tried to repair itself, but a permanent mark of discoloured skin is always left. It’s your coping mechanism but you don’t know what for. 

if i just lay here

The goodness of your heart is often exploited by the odd few. Your main job is to care for the people who need it the most, and outside of that employment, why should you stop? Over the years, they’ve given you hundreds of reasons to stop. It’s like you are a piece of twirling ribbon which can wrap oh, so effortlessly around a person’s finger. You’ve tried before to react and make them stop, but it all ends up becoming worse and worse and you fight yourself caught in a maze where the exit is impossible to find. And then you’re trapped.

But something you excel in is merely shrugged off by the other citizens of your district. Everyone is the same, everyone is capable of performing the hardest mathematics problem and everyone is able to decipher between this and that. You’ve been one to always try to rise above the others, but it’s hard and requires patience which you lack. Read, study, research – that’s the motto you try to live by. You just want something to separate you from the rest, and for now you want it to be your mental capacity. 

You’ve always been taught to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. There was once a time where you’d spun an endless web of lines – everyone digging you deeper and deeper into the dirty ground. It was then that you realised the importance of telling the truth. Lying won’t get you anywhere, and you know that now. People think you are too forward for voicing your thoughts on something so quickly and spontaneously – whether they are good or bad, for worse or for better. Everyone else is probably thinking it, so what should stop them from saying it? You think you’ll be doing them a favour from saying what you do and when you do, but sometimes, you couldn’t be more wrong.

would you lie with me

You’d always been enthused in nature. Every plant and flower, in your eyes, was beautiful and had a book of tales which it would read to you (if it could). You think that the love came from your grandmother, as she would provide the less fortunate in your district with medicinal plants and somewhat extreme herbal remedies which promised to “do wonders”. She’d taught you everything she knew when you inherited her old diary. A book stuffed with curly, vintage handwriting where she told her experiences of love and loss – her stories of creating the wrong concoctions and her undying love for cats. It’s precious to you; always will be and always has been. That will never change.

A fascination in the science comes easy to those in six. You know, that if not reaped for the dire games, you’d probably become one of those people wearing a pure white coat who pours liquids of every colour into oddly clean glass beakers. But do you want to? You’d watched as the Capitol piled pressure on your mother and her company, causing a depression which leaves her entangled in an eternal darkness. The memories of your father staying up in (what seemed like) endless nights was only too familiar. If the job was passed onto you, how would you cope? Would you become one of them and crumble under the pressure? Or would you excel, like you’d always hoped you would. For now, you can only hope.

Death has left a firm imprint on your mind ever since you first encountered it. You were walking along one of those incredibly normal, yet often dusty, paths. Your eyes focused on your childish feet as you’d skip playfully around in the summer air. But something stopped you from swirling and twirling – and that thing was as simple as a frog: a dead frog. It looked so peaceful, a serenity which so many people long for but never know how to find it. You wonder if people knew that death could send you to such a sleep, would people want to die? Because in that moment, that was how you felt. You just wanted the hardships of everything and anything to be lifted as you’d slowly leak from your body and enter a world of nothingness. Of course, fear of the pain and heartbreak inflicted upon others would stop anyone in their tracks. Or, so you’d think.

and just forget the world