cressida peter // d4 {fin}

⇴⇴⇴

dearest father,

i miss you more than you will ever know. home never quite feels like a haven for me, as ‘homely’ as mother tries to make it. i don’t think she realizes that no amount of flower vases or paintings or open windows (she acts as if the crisp sea air is a viable cure for all ailments) will make any of this feel right. i haven’t felt right in years. it sounds almost whiny when i put it in words, but everything has slowed down and i don’t think it’s fair. lucy’s just started school, finn’s taking up work from wherever she can get it and mother… i’m not even sure if i can stomach writing about her.

regardless of the progress everyone else is making in their lives, i’ve made none. i feel as though my development has grinded to a halt. i haven’t grown a single inch since you left all those years ago. mother says it’s because i had an early growth spurt, but i think it’s my body’s way of protesting. who knows. it just seems more poetic that way.

the ocean doesn’t call to me anymore. it used to, small but distinct whispers, so close i could almost reach out and touch it at all times. after you left, it stopped. i think maybe you were the one who gave me my love for the ocean. i suppose when all that’s keeping you and something else connected is another entity, the bond can easily be broken when said entity disappears. or dies. or leaves, in any way. because what’s keeping us together? i only went to visit the ocean when you were with me. i stopped visiting six months ago. i don’t miss it.

i mentioned that finn is taking up work. i think she’s excited about it. her eyes always light up when she talks about it, in a way i haven’t seen since she was eight. lucy’s popular with the girls at school, as well. she came home yesterday with a handmade bracelet woven around her wrist with her initials on them. she hasn’t taken it off yet.

but home still doesn’t feel like home without you. it sounds corny, and i’ve always wished i could articulate my feelings about this better. or at all. i think you always brought out some strange ability within me to be able to put everything into words beautifully, without any effort. but now i write slowly, drinking in as much inspiration from my atmosphere around me as possible before finding the strength to write one single sentence. it’s pathetic. i haven’t written a poem in – what, a year? i know i should be disappointed in myself for giving up the only talent i had, but no matter how much i ridicule myself, the feeling never comes.

perhaps i should try harder. force myself, against my better judgment, to do things and learn things and take up a new hobby. i train sometimes. it’s more out of boredom than any desire to actually volunteer. at least if i know how to handle a blade, i will have something in common with the rest of the kids here.

i think i’ve surpassed the five-hundred word limit i put on these letters. i’ve always been hopeless at sticking within boundaries. i guess it’s a little redundant to put restrictions on creativity – it kind of crushes the purpose of being creative – but i try to be stricter with myself these days.

goodbye for now, father. i love you always,
cressida x

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She’s often found her life dictated by pathetic fallacy – a simple transition between a cloudless sky and a furious thunderstorm can shift her entire persona. Perhaps she’s weak-minded; too easily manipulated by extraneous factors to have her own sense of identity. Or maybe she’s just reading too deeply into it, as she always seems to be.

Regardless of whether her mood swings are caused by weather or rampant hormones, she has them. Of course, there are separate types of mood swings – violent, uncoordinated ones, where furniture is thrown and curses are hurled with little to no concern for what is going on. She doesn’t get those often, unless her mother pisses her off to the extent where she feels the healthiest possible way to communicate her feelings is by smashing a stainless white plate. The swings more common of Cressida are the calculated ones. A plotted, personal attack, directly aimed at her from her mind.

She descends slowly into a strange sense of being lost, directionless, which is nothing different than her usual train of thought. She’s always aware of time passing, confused and left dazed at how she was fourteen three years ago, and how she’ll never have the chance to be that age again. It can happen on a smaller scale as well; ten minutes will pass and she’ll realize that she did nothing in that time. The sound of a clock’s faint ticking becomes louder in her mind as she thinks of how one day she’ll be trapped in a routine way of living that she can never escape from. Gazing at the borders of the district remind her of her place in the world, and how she will never see beyond them.

Confinement creates boredom. Even the simple constraints of a closed window, or the opaqueness of a wall is confinement to her. The boredom is harrowing, and she hasn’t yet learned how to cope with it, if there is any way. She feels as though her motivation to do things died alongside her childhood. Although her mother argues that she’s barely reached the end of adolescence, she would disagree – many factors have led her to grow up far faster than was expected. At seventeen, she now stands, drumming her fingertips against empty lines of paper to distract from the fact that she has no words to be spoken. Her thoughts are no longer in locution – instead, they are abstract, various strands of words dotted around here and there, scarcely enough to string together a sentence.

There’s only one occasion where she finds the words, whether they’re the right ones or not. Maybe it helps when she considers that she’s writing the words for a purpose. Maybe it’s enhanced by the fact that she’s writing them for a person, even if they’ll never read it. It gives each sentence meaning, reason, and she gains the capability to write.

With this in mind, she picks up the pen and presses it down to the page.

⇴⇴⇴

father,

the sea whispered my name this morning. it was unfamiliar at first, and i thought i may have been hearing things – a trick of the wind, perhaps, or… i’m not sure. but after replaying it over and over in my mind, and thinking, i believe it truly was the sea. perhaps it wishes to call for my presence. perhaps it is merely taunting me. either way, i wish to go there and see tonight.

finn offered to ask her boss about getting me a job there as well. i declined. i’m not quite sure why, and when i think about it, i wonder what possessed me to refuse such an offer. it would do me good. i need to get out of the house more these days, and if i can support my sisters and mother whilst doing so, it would be even better. but i declined. why?

i’ll just blame it on the thunderstorm.

i’ve been thinking about becoming a career. not the half-assed attempt i’ve been making so far, but a real, genuine career. i don’t particularly consider myself a violent person, nor do i have a specific passion for inflicting pain on others, but there’s something freeing about wielding a weapon. i can’t quite put my finger on it. perhaps i will ask the sea, tonight.

it feels odd writing a letter without saying this, so here – i miss you. i don’t think i was ever the sea’s favourite. i think you were. you always treated it so lovingly, running your hands ever so delicately over the incoming waves, as if it was something that needed protecting.

i don’t think i’m strong enough to protect myself, let alone the sea. but you were always strong, and that made me feel strong.

i'll go to the shore tonight. it's the least i can do.

i love you always,
cressida x

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Perhaps it is time she talked about her father.

It’s the only thing people ever want to know about her. Old family friends, strangers at school, anyone who knew him, or thought they knew him. Their gazes feel like attacks to her, the curious and pitying expressions, the pats on her shoulder that are meant to be encouraging and comforting but end up just being patronizing. They try to dodge the subject, talking about anything else – they run their fingers through their hair (“it’s so long and red and pretty, you must be proud of it”) and find the smallest things to point out about anything else. Anything other than her father.

You could probably count the number of times she’s mentioned him out loud since he left on one hand. His name feels like some sort of curse, a forbidden word within the house. She’s not sure what the standard protocol is for when someone leaves like that. She’s never met anyone else who lost someone the same way. She doesn’t know whether she’s grateful or not for that.

Cressida Peter is the middle child out of three. Finn is almost a year older than her; the planned pregnancy, unlike Cressida, who was what her father called a ‘happy accident’. She knows he was just trying to make her feel better. Her mother had always been very precise about what she wanted – two children, a few years apart, raised to be well-mannered hard workers. Despite this, she was highly pro-life, and her husband was far too intent on raising this accidental child just as they intended on raising Finn and Lucy.

It was ironic, really. As much as her mother refused to admit it, Cressida was the more well-behaved of the group – the one who lived up to her expectations the most. She was always a stubborn woman, but even she had to bite the bullet and begin treating her like her daughter. She had, after all, given birth to her. It would be a waste not to raise her like the others.

Her mother never hated her; she very much loved her, as a daughter, as family, as blood. However, it was a different type of love to what she showed Finn and Lucy – more tough, more demanding. Maybe that’s why she’s the one who ended up becoming some sort of career instead of the other two. Where Finn and Lucy have soft flesh, Cressida has small ripples of muscle, tracing across her arm and her thighs and forming a small definition around her stomach. She doesn’t eat much. Seafood reminds her of the sea, which reminds her of her father, and as much as she wishes her mind would stop playing these association games with her, it makes her feel sick to the stomach.

The love her mother showed towards her changed drastically after the untimely departure of her father. Before, the fact that Cressida had taken on most of her father’s genes was almost endearing to the woman; now, she loathed it. She always mutters something under her breath – something about the nose – that indicates that just looking at her own daughter reminds her of him. Cressida can’t be mad at her for it. She wants to, but even looking in the mirror herself, she feels a little shocked. It gets worse as she gets older. As she grew out of her baby face, dropping the extra pudge she gained around her pre-teen years, her face becoming more defined and chiseled and adult-like, she developed a face that could be seen on the feminine side of androgynous. She keeps her hair long so that one thing separates her from looking like her father. With her boyish, slender figure and sharp features, she could easily pass as more masculine if not for the long mane of ginger hair.

Her father told her to keep it long. He’d run his fingers through it when she got sleepy, and tell her stories of his work and the sea and all kinds of sea creatures. He was a typical District Four man; it was most likely fate he was put here, since he seemed to have a genuine passion for the ocean, not just one brought about by circumstance. He adored watching his daughters splash in the sea, and he adored his wife, and his house, and his community. He was against having any of the girls trained to be careers. In Four, there’s a sense of comfort in knowing that someone will most likely volunteer in place of any unwilling tributes, so he never spent much time worrying about it. His philosophy was something along the lines of doing what you love and never letting a day go by unlived. Something cliché that would make his wife roll her eyes every time he went off on a tangent about it. He knew how to make her laugh, whether it was with him, at him, at a joke, at something he did, whatever. Cressida wishes she inherited that from him, so she wouldn’t have to ever see a face of disappointment again.

He killed himself when she was fifteen. She always dances around it, trying to find any other way to say it – left, departed, no longer with us, – but that’s all there is to it. She wishes she knew the reason. She wishes she could have prevented it. She wishes she could erase the memory of her father’s body hanging from the bedroom ceiling from her mind, but she was the first one to return home after she’d felt ill at school. Finn followed shortly after. They didn’t let Lucy into the house until the body was gone.

It’s not poetic. There’s no poetic way to talk about it. She’s tried it all – writing it out in cursive, hiding it in a poem, but there’s no romantic way to talk about suicide. She knows that now. She thinks about all the times she watched the Games, all the times she saw the corpses of the fallen from the safety of her own front room, and wonders why even that didn’t prepare her for seeing one in the flesh.

She can’t think about it for long. It makes her feel dizzy. She packs her pen and notepad into a small duffel bag at approximately seven thirty, and sneaks out the house via the backdoor.

⇴⇴⇴

The ocean is quiet today. As quiet as it has been for the past two years, at least; it feels almost as though the small and slight whisper she heard before was a mere illusion of the mind, some means of coping with boredom.

At least it got me out of the house.

She lets her fingers trail over the gentle waves the same way her father always used to, and her thoughts drift off elsewhere. She thinks of home, home as it was before, not as it is now. Bright sunlight casting through the windows, open curtains indicating happiness and contentedness rather than a desperate defense mechanism against emptiness. When her mother didn’t need to place potted plants in every corner of each room just to bring some vitality into the house. She wonders if her father knew what impact it would have when he did it. Maybe he was deluded into thinking nobody would care. She can’t even bring herself to explain how much she cares.

Mourning is strange. She had never mourned before then, and assumed it was just a few weeks or months or years of tears and loneliness and anger before moving on. But it’s slower, more select – one day she can lie on her side with a completely blank mind, the next she can be up and about doing chores around the house, the next she can be slamming doors and punching pillows. It’s slow, painfully slow, and sometimes she wishes she could have just had a few months of the worst kind of pain instead of this dragged-out agony.

She never considered death something to be feared. He would always iterate, over and over, how insignificant a single human is compared to the world around them, how the vastness of the ocean could put any arrogant career in their place if they thought hard enough about it. He said that death was inevitable; a fairly obvious statement, but spoken from his lips, it calmed her more than she could ever imagine.

Maybe that’s her problem. She’s too sensitive to too many factors – who, what, where, when, why – that nothing sounds right if it’s in the wrong situation. A brush of a stranger’s arm against hers can send her into a spiral of panic. Anyone who isn’t her father giving her advice is liable to a kick in the abdomen. It’s just how her mind works, and she hates it; she hates how every word that comes out of her mother’s mouth annoys her solely for the fact that it’s her. She hates how she feels almost angry when Lucy laughs because her father isn’t here to see it. She hates how all the family photographs are taken down, she hates how the ocean doesn’t call to her anymore, she hates how directionless and uninspiring her life is, yet she makes no effort to change.

She’s never written that in her letters. Father doesn’t deserve it, after all.

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father,

the sea refused to speak to me tonight.

father,

the sea has spoken to me tonight, and it says i am healing.