robyne hawn | ten

You were a happy girl. Always smiling, always trying to make everyone laugh. You saw the best in the worst people – strength or weakness, you still don’t know.

You were popular. You always got invited to birthday parties. Always the first to be chosen for team sports, even though you held all the grace of a baby deer finding its legs for the first time. They never chose you for your athleticism – they chose you for your kindness.

For you were bright, in more than one sense of the word. You kept your wits around you, used your short stature to your advantage in playground games of hide and seek. And you were warm – golden, a heart made of the precious metal.

You were a cry baby. Shedding tears at the drop of a hat, your soul of water aligning perfectly with the stars of a February baby. You were blessed with puppy dog eyes that would make a criminal turn themselves in, if you asked them to. You had the world in the palm of your hand, but you never learnt how to use it.

You were naïve. Sheltered. Even as the world fell around you, you couldn’t understand cruel.

You were never one for luck.

Four dead kittens, abandoned in a cardboard box – you tried to save them, you tried so hard.

Three-leaf clovers – you keep searching for four.

Two broken bones – your right arm, your left pinky.

One name on a slip of paper.

Fast-forward to fourteen, you live in a daze, wearing a smile that doesn’t glow as bright as it used to.

The fights have stopped, or at least that’s the smokescreen of illusion your mum and dad tell you as they tuck you into bed, kiss your forehead twice and turn on the night light beside you.

You want to ask: if the war is over, why are there kids dying on our television screen?

Instead, you screw your eyes shut and try to forget.

In the beginning, they thought it was a one-time event. “A warning. A reminder that they're in charge. We’ll be okay, if we keep our heads down.”

“You’re safe.”

Those rumours were wrong.

Twelve years old: a rebel winner.

Thirteen years old: a rebel winner.

Fourteen years old: a rebel winner.

“We’re going to be okay.” The quiver in your father’s voice fills you with dread.

Still, you believed your parents. It’s easier that way.

They’ll blame themselves, in the days that follow. Maybe it was their own cowardice that caused them to lose the only good thing in their world. Maybe you would have been safer hiding in plain sight, in the midst of the war with a gun slung over your shoulder. Maybe they should have taken down a few Peacekeepers along the way, if they were always going to lose you.

In time, they’ll realise none of it mattered.

When they watch you fall to the ground in a mess of broken bones and severed limbs, they will cry just as you did the entire way to the Capitol. They won’t eat for days, can’t sleep without seeing your bleeding body on replay behind closed eyelids. The pain is never-ending. Insufferable.

They’ll fall asleep in solidarity, at peace with their decision.

They’ll be found two days later, lying together in their bed with fingers intertwined. A single portrait of your face perched upon your mum’s chest.

More faces lost to a war none of you belonged to.

Happy endings don’t exist here.