eros ridley | district three | fin

e r o s ridley;

They told you smoking was a horrid habit but they never once thought to take your matches away. Twelve years with one family, five with the next and they have tired of you and dumped you here.

An orphanage on the edge of District Three becomes your sanctuary. You are not broken. You do not need a father to stitch you back together or a mother's hands to make yourself whole. Those people - those parents may have burned for you once, but you are a star. You are timeless. Ignited by nothing but your own bright love. You endeavor to take that love, build something new out of the ashes and blood. Make a home for yourself out of your own existence as your own self, unbowed and unbroken.

One more year then you are free and you can be alone - a solitary star in a galaxy of comets. You are a wolf - howling your ache to the dusk sky that burns with amethyst nights and golden days.

You challenge yourself by fighting - how many days and nights did you wander back to your foster family's home with a bleeding lip, black eye, and scratches down your back? Your knuckles bloodied and torn to shreds but you needed to steal this breath from your lungs, you needed to drown yourself, exhaling blackness. Your world began and ended each night with destruction.

When fighting lost its glamour - and it did, quite frequently - you would escape to the edge of the District, ducking the Peacekeepers for a moment of quiet and clarity. The silence like a thunder crash and you can exhale. You can quiet the demons, light up a cigarette, and sit at the edge of your world. You would scream, scream until god’s ears bled. Until he could hear you properly. Until they - your parents - could hear you properly. Was this what they had planned for you? Was this what they wanted?

It would be no different at the orphanage - parents turned to administrators but you could still sneak fights into your nights. You could still sneak cigarettes into your bookbag. You could still find the guy on the corner for a quick bump to keep you going, the rush from the powder setting stars off in your eyes.

Nothing would have to change and your world would remain the same. One more year and you can leave to learn a trade. You're good with your hands and architects were in short supply but needed to construct the ever-growing splendor of the Capitol. You are damned, but aren’t all artists with eyes that can see through hearts?

That is until you saw him. Everything shifted, turning on its axis, and you lose the breath in your lungs like a punch to the gut. Your voice shakes, your hands fly through your dark hair, smoothing down the stubborn locks, and you bump into a table on your exit from the room.

You are shaking as you run outside, sprinting through the gates to an abandoned alleyway. You light a cigarette and try to inhale the calm but you knew his eyes saw right through you as you left the room. Idiot, you scold yourself.

Just be fucking cool.

After that, his face is filled in the pages of your sketchbook, hidden under your pillow for safekeeping. You can't get his face just right yet and you doubt you ever will. The curves and the lines will never do justice to what you see each morning.

You want to promise him the moon, promise him stardust, promise him anything to see that smile. He knew he was not allowed to want him, the way his eyes followed the other boy in the orphanage. He would lie if ever asked. You pour yourself out with reckless abandon, like a bottle of fine whiskey gone to waste. You are like a slow-moving car crash, disjointed limbs and polysyllabic heartbeats, a thunderstorm in your heart and swear words dripping from your lips.

After you see him for the first time, you try to fight a guy who has a good six inches on you. It doesn’t end well and you limp back to the orphanage to nurse your wounds, the pain making you forget him, even when he is seared into your brain. You get disciplined for fighting, but what can they do to you that the guy didn’t earlier/? You throw yourself against the walls and call it madness, call it agony, but it's just existing - it’s just existence.

You take another bump inside your room, hiding the evidence in an old sock drawer as you lay there, nursing your wounds and dreaming up ways to get others. Your body a battlefield and your soul tarnished. Black eyes as armor so he can’t draw you in. You’re a fucking mess. But you are your own - no one owns you and your fire.

You are timeless.