The Deep End [wallflowers]

Something cracks and all I can think is shit.

Because it suddenly feels as though this is the day I die. Arms splayed out, fists swinging in nebulous motions, staggering around a muddy field like a blind man with punctured ribs. So many things just feel broken and wrong inside of me - in a way that’s much more different than the usual. It’s the opposite of heroic or noble or dignifying. It’s humiliating. Terrifying.

I fall and someone catches me. That person hauls my deadweight across the field, far enough so that the noise of war behind us begins to sound muffled and distant and unreal. None of this feels real. Not the sharp pain in my ribs or my legs. Not the axe I drag in the mud as I’m pulled away from the fight. Not even the pulsing, red-hot fear that naturally comes with close calls with death.

But, then, Danny’s voice - a hot breeze blown across my cheekbones - whispers, “You’ve really done it this time, Trouble,” and everything suddenly whirlwinds back into focus. Her voice drifts clumsily to my ears through the mesh of my frantic heartbeat and dramatic breaths and the sounds our feet make when we drag them through the soft, damp muck that is this Arena’s ground. “What did you do to make them hate you so much?,” she asks me. I shudder heavy breaths (the kind that shakes you from your shoulders to your stomach) in response. She says nothing. Just grips me tighter, pulls me through the woods faster.

I’d like to tell her that I’ve just never been a particularly lucky person, but I think that’s maybe an understatement by now. Or that it even just goes without being said. And I don’t wanna waste anymore of my breath.

Because life has always been this way for me: a series of falls, like a chain of never-ending dominoes, with hits that always hurt more than the last one. No pause, no warning, no chance for me to brace myself for the next one. Saying anything about my luck now would definitely not make a difference.

Being born in the gutter - in the absolute bottom of the food chain that is Life and Survival and Fate and Luck - makes you realize this fact from early on. Makes you recognize the futility of a prayer. The gutter makes you her bitch. The gutter doesn’t discriminate. From the day you are born (a swollen, wet clump of cells screeching cries on top of dirt floors and under leaking roofs), she instills the need to survive within you like a sixth sense. Starving? You scrape off the bottom of a garbage can for dinner. Cold? You wear the same winter coat you’ve been wearing for the past five years and brave the storm. Tired? You steal a pair of shoes from the tailor’s once he turns his back. Angry? You deal with it. Angry? You hold it in. Angry? You forget about it.

Angry? You fight.

And that’s what they decide to do (‘they’ being Ezero, Delta, and Danny). They make me sit on some rocks and try to bandage up what’s left of my broken body, and, then, they’re gone. A sliver of bodies disappearing behind trees and mist and the beads of sweat (blood?) trickling into my eyes. They leave me alone, and all I can think is that this wouldn’t be the first time.