Meditations [Vasco/Emma]

I take a moment on the steps of the justice building to stare back at the front of the old stone façade, and trace my eyes up toward the clock in the center. I think about the seconds counting down until Arianna and Rex are carted away, left in the hands of people that saw them the same as the boxes of grains we shipped out of the district yesterday morning. I thought I had prepared well enough for seeing them off, but all the feelings come rushing back into my throat again. I have to catch myself before I start crying, and wipe away any remnants of tears with a coat sleeve. I sniffle away whatever’s left while I make my way down the steps and onto the street.

I wonder if folks saw me as a farce standing up on that stage this morning.

I get to thinking about what good had I done since being named Mayor, other than sorting out some shipments and opening a shelter for the destitute to get out of the cold? As hard fought as the election had been, the world around me stopped as soon as the reaping had been announced. How many more weeks would folks spend too much of their time with their heads buried in the games, their lives torn up because of what the capitol was forcing us to watch? Now, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to help our own (if anything, another knot in my stomach tied up that I wasn’t going to be able to do enough), but I would be the first to admit that I spent afternoons shouting at the grainy television over what our tributes had decided to do.

Of course, I had until Raquel.

I spent so many nights thinking of her after the seventy-sixth. Evenings where Sofia would come out to the kitchen with a candle lit and tell me that the sun was coming up soon. Or mornings where Emma would shake me awake to tell me if I didn’t get moving I’d be strung up for missing my shift. I remember telling her that it was like walking through a heavy fog, with boots in mud. Each step was harder to take than the last, and I thought – well, tomorrow will be better, if I only push myself through. I was sure that I’d be prepared to see her fall (and a part of me had always closed my eyes seeing her come back, and hugging her on stage, whispering te quiero mi quelita). But all that was me imagining, and telling myself stories so I could just push through. I watched her when she died. I saw those last, crippling breaths that strained from her lips, where I knew she was going over but here I was, safe. Free.

I think – I think I might’ve just sat for a good while, completely still.

Everyone’s always in such a hurry to figure out what comes next, they barely have time to live in the moment. It’s easy enough when the world around feels like it could be pulled from underneath your feet. Dreams come to tempt and turn you away from what’s all around you - that we live in an imperfect place, one that we don’t own and can’t control. I think, even as my cousins and nephew and niece were taken away, I clung to what I knew, the small little part of the world, because it could bring me happiness. I could spend afternoons with Raquel teaching her old words, or with Emmanuel playing dominoes.

And you start to think about how one day you’ll see them like your parents saw you, walking down an aisle with the person they love, or cradling a little one in their arms. Dreams can sustain just as easily as they can break us; it’s that we can’t live on dreams alone. Not in a world where we don’t have enough to eat, or families spend one last evening all together wondering, is this it? There’s not enough in me to shoulder what burdens are coming; I wonder if I’ll ever be the type of man that lives up to what I’ve promised.

I couldn’t for Raquel. I didn’t.

As I walk along the gravel roads outside of town, back toward the baserri and watch the winter shake the dust along the dormant fields, I know that nothing good comes from giving in to this darkness.

We could take the tack that each of us is born into a pitiful life. That we’re given little scraps in district eleven to fight over, and lose piece after piece. That would be easy, to think the world could never change. I think of how much Marisol has seen in eighty-plus years; how far have we come since she got here? All the boys and girls that grew up Izars, that planted the fields and sowed us into creation, what would they think seeing me now?

I can’t excuse the capitol. Not the what they’ve done to me or my family, or anyone else’s. But I know that there are those that have always found meaning in destroying others. We can’t change them, or have them think differently. But it doesn’t cost me anything to be kind, or good, or do what’s right.

When I open the door into the living room, I spy Yani playing with a doll along the end of the old plaid couch. She has it walking along the hardwood floor and doesn’t look up when I close the door behind me. I take a few steps before flopping down beside her, and sit back with my hands flat against the ground. She toddles the doll over my leg and up onto my chest with a smile. “Papá, eres una montaña,” She says, and I lie still.

It’s then I stare past the couch and to the door frame that connects to the kitchen. Emma looks on and I give a wave.