sarika saraswami d3 | fin

My hair is a mixture of silver and black, streaks of color visible in their strands. It's much thinner now than it was in my youth, when I would always complain about how often it got tangled. I have large eyes framed by glasses, a round face, and warm brown skin that always stayed the same color through the seasons no matter how much I wished it would be as light as my classmates'. There's no point hating the body I was born with, though, not when it's healthy enough to do its job of keeping me alive for the past eighty years.

It seems easier to accept myself, now that I'm older and can look back on how long I've lived. I used to be so self-conscious of my dark skin and blemished face and having curves in all the wrong places, but by this point all of those things are overshadowed by wrinkles anyways. I'm not ashamed of having been vain, either, because growing out of younger selves is a part of life, too. 

The one thing that hasn't changed is that I still like wearing dresses, and the color pink. Most of my wardrobe consists of dresses in flowery prints, along with scarves and leggings for when it gets cold in the winter. I prefer snowy days to the sweltering heat of summer, especially when the heat makes worse the smog and pollution around the district. Not many around the district dress like me, it seems, and there are always those who will assume things, but I do not choose my clothes for others.

They say that people become more extroverted as they grow older, and that's true of me - I was certainly much shyer when I was a child. I would always prefer to hide in my room or an empty hallway with a book instead of making friends with the other children. They never stopped invading my personal space and always poking their nose in my business; my biggest wish was that they would all leave me alone. Then after we moved to District Three, they did, and I lived happily in my own world as Panem erupted in upheaval around me.

I hated being involved in conflict, even to stand up to myself. I would rather avoid those who bullied me than confront them, because just thinking about being in such a confrontation made spiders crawl in my stomach and skeletons clench the heart that hammered away in my chest. I's easier to survive when you make no waves and don't stand out but just go about minding your own business. I still don't like to yell at people or to make big disruptions, even though I'm desperately sure of all the things that need to change.

Nonetheless, I hope I have made enough changes, in my own small ways, to make a positive difference in the lives of those around me. In these twilight years, that's something I've been trying to focus on, something tangible. A conversation here and there with others in the district square, finding others that I can tell my stories to. One of my hobbies is making wire jewelry, and I'm happy to give my creations to younger citizens who stop and listen to what I have to say.

My mind is filled with stories, old memories from childhood years and Dark Days filtered through the lens of time and relevance. They say history repeats itself, and while that's not exactly true, there are always parallels if you know where to look. And I remember everything. People have praised me for my sharp memory, and it's part of what has made me into such a successful researcher. But now, I use it to remember those who would otherwise be erased, to make the connections other can't, not because they've forgotten but because they were never there to remember. 

I was ten when the rebellion happened, my family living in what is now known as District Eight. I still remember waking up to see my parents glued to the TV, as the screen showed bombs falling on the remnants of district thirteen. I remember being scared for my life walking to school because the Peacekeepers were looking for any excuse to gun down a suspected rebel - there were many in our district. I remember students cornering me on the playground and asking me which side I supported when all I wanted was to stay out of the whole mess and disappear into a favorite book. 

I remember the new mayor knocking on our door and ordering our family to move to Three because my dad had done some engineering work that would be more in demand there that in the district now assigned to produce textiles and materials. I was happy to leave, or so I thought, because in a district full of people who valued intelligence I wouldn't be teased anymore for liking math or being short or always having my nose stuck in a book. Then the Capitol announced they were holding a Hunger Games, and I was still unconcerned, not when I was ten and only those over twelve had a chance of being reaped.

Oh, how foolish I was back then! Nothing ever changes so easily, after all. Maybe they'd stopped shoving me and stealing my glasses and ripping my papers out of my hands, but the boys in my new classes still stuck their noses in the air and pretended not to hear me talking. But being invisible is something you can learn. Being invisible is something you can get used to. The most visible position, after all, was on the stage next to the reaping ball, and that was not where I wanted to find myself.

We shouldn't have been surprised, when the Capitol decided to make the Hunger Games an annual occurrence, reaping two of us between twelve and eighteen each year. It was a numbers game, then, how I managed to survive each year without getting reaped, until I realized it wasn't and the reapings were rigged, had been from the beginning to punish the families of those who rebelled.

Some of my bullies from Eight were reaped, by at that point it didn't matter when I was miles away from being their target. When I was sixteen I watched one of them die live on television, stabbed through the eye by a girl from Two, and that was when I first started feeling doubt.

You kept silent your doubts, even in a relatively trusted district like Three, because expressing thoughts against the system was the fastest way to fall from the Peacekeepers' good graces. Otherwise, nobody really paid attention to a shy little girl like me. I worked hard, got good grades, and what I wanted most was to finish my degree and get a research position at one of the physics laboratories in the district. I was happiest figuring out calculations or testing theories, when I didn't have to interact with other people.

Three has managed to stay in the Capitol's good graces for a very long time, notwithstanding its general disinterest in things like training for the Hunger Games. Those of us fanatically loyal to the Capitol worked at designing technologies for the Peacekeepers, expanding the ever-growing network of information that they could utilize. Those less inclined to take those jobs could still make a good living spending their time on research or in the factories making trinkets of little political relevance.

I was one of those; the theories I spent my time testing were unlikely to ever be used in building products or having any practical purpose at all, but I enjoyed my job, enjoyed the thrill of discovery and those moments where everything fit together. It was a long time before I realized that avoiding thinking about the issues those in other districts faced, not having an opinion on the thugs we saw on TV from districts like Eight or Eleven was the same as tacitly supporting the Capitol's policies.

I was one of the lucky ones, really, to be able to afford to at all. My family had been well off when the Dark Days began, and being a researcher was a relatively stable job. But the more years passed and the more polluted District Three got, the poorer its poorest citizens became. Hardly anybody took tesserae, when they were first introduced, but now I see the little kids in droves, lining up outside the Justice Building at the beginning of every month for the meager supply of grain and oil the increased odds of death gave them. Statistically, it's not a much bigger risk than the kids who work the dangerous jobs in the factories for a bit of extra cash, but - this isn't the District Three I used to know. This isn't the district I imagined myself living in, back when I was a kid.

At eighty-one, I'm one of the oldest people alive in the district. Hardly anyone remembers what it was like before the rebellion, before there was mandatory segregation and Hunger Games and crushing inequality, but I remember everything. When we moved to Three, my mother gave me a journal, "so you can describe the new district and write all your feelings in it". It's a habit that's stuck with me, and I have seventy years worth of journals, all tightly fitting in the bottom drawer of my nightstand where they've been stored for years. They might get me in trouble, if anyone bothered to read the terrible handwriting, bad poetry, and mad ramblings of an old woman. I don't have kids to pass my things onto, having never been interested in pursuing a relationship. But memories are important. History and reflections are important. Now that I've retired from research, I've turned my efforts towards writing, in hopes that some of these can be preserved for posterity. One day, I hope I'll be able to publish my experiences, whether that is in a memoir, or some more fictionalized format. It will be a shame, if one day people come to accept their situation because they no longer know what they have lost. I am not rebellious enough to stand out, but I hope I can inspire others through the images I paint with my words.