Tristitia Long//District Five//Fin

There are some things you just don't say out loud. You can't sit down at the breakfast table and over the runny eggs your Mom has dished out onto a cracked plastic plate that you don't think anyone would care if you disappeared.

Which is why I have saved all my pennies and bought this journal off a old woman on the square.
If I can't be me out in the world, I can at least try to be in these pages.

So um, first all my name is Trisitia Long, I live in District Five, and I think everyone hates me. Not really. I mean that I think everyone hates me. I know they don't. I have friends who like me, and I'm sure strangers don't care enough about me to hate me, but it certainly feels like they do. Even when I bought this journal I dropped my coins and I thought the old lady definitely wasn't going to sell me the papers anymore. I mean, I embarrassed myself- a dumb young girl spilling money everywhere, what would she do with a journal? Certainly lose all the papers.

My thoughts are getting kind of jumbled here let me try again.

I'm writing here because when I'm around other people my stomach feels like one of the oil rigs near my house. Except not exactly. Ripred, metaphors are hard. It feels like when the heavy arm is swinging down, like you're falling. I never feel the rising part, just the falling. It's like I'm always falling, always forgetting something, always on the brink of disaster. But I know I'm not, I just can't convince myself I'm safe.

The worst part of all of this is that I do like people. I like making friends at school and seeing family members at the end of the day, but the falling in my stomach makes it feel like something is wrong.

So I power through. I ignore the free fall as much as I can and I smile.

To be honest I do have a good smile. I've seen in the shop windows and shiny machinery. So at least I have that going for me.

I think girls naturally have better smiles than boys. They have fuller lips so their mouths look soft. Boys look harsh- thin hard lips, and then prickly facial hair sprouting around them like a barbed wire. I mean I don't know what any lips feel like, I haven't had the chance to kiss anyone yet. Well, I kissed my cousin when I was like six but we don't talk about that because gross. I mean a real kiss, like passion and wind blowing and ripped shirts and crossing stars and all that stuff.

I guess I need to clear up my reasons for writing in this journal because my first couple of pages seem rather dire. I really am a cheerful person- I promise. I laugh a lot, I tell jokes, and I dance. Well, mostly dance around my room. We don't get a lot of music here so my choices are the Capitol anthem or beating on some buckets with a stick. Most of the time I make up the music in my head, which is why I only dance in my room because I'd look like a crazy person if I did it out in the open. But back to the journal. I have friends, and I like them we have fun but there are some feelings, the worst parts of me, that I can't tell friends about. I'm a happy person and telling them the dark sticky parts of my mind would make them... I don't know hate me? Not hate me, but at least avoid me. I have been living with these thoughts in m ribs long enough and I need them out. They weigh too much and they make my dancing awkward.

So um, gross thoughts: I'm not good enough, and I'll only ever accomplish anything if I'm reaped because then I'll die a hero.

See? Not a good thought, but it's been wandering around my head for a while and now it's gone. It's on the paper and out of my body.

Okay gross thought two: I'll never find love.

It's out of me, and while some worry still lingers I feel better.

For now anyway. We'll see how this experiment goes.

Maybe I'll write a story in this journal. Like a great love story or a grand adventure. We don't have many books so I could be the one to write them for the district. Rip them out and bind them and set them on a shelf in the square. Or hawk them like fortune tellers on the out skirts of the shops. Both seem interesting, but of course anything is more interesting than studying oil. Being so close to leaving school we've stopped learning about anything else. It's all oil this and machinery that and fuel, fuel, fuel. Oil, while vital, isn't terribly interesting after years of study. At least, not for me.

I like bodies. I watch the way the people around me move. How some people walk with limps, or their legs bow out. Some people's toes point inwards, some people talk with their hands. I'm one of the hand talkers for sure. It's just crazy that we all have, basically, the same body but we end up looking and using it so differently. Some people shuffle, some march. Some people are delicate and some are hard. There is so much to the physicality of people we never notice. I like to watch it in the tributes during the games. The careers always move differently than the rest- confident and practiced.

I try to move like them, like I'm sure of my next decision. The only problem is that I rarely am.

But I use my body the way I was meant to. I wiggle and twist in my room, spinning on tip toe and stretching up as high as I can past the ceiling and the sky to the stars.

Maybe, one day, I'll catch one.