metamorphosis. isla.
Oct 7, 2020 10:02:47 GMT -5
Post by 🌱 kaitlin. on Oct 7, 2020 10:02:47 GMT -5
THE ONLY THING I REMEMBER FROM MY CHILDHOOD IS WHEN YOU ARE SCARED MAKE YOURSELF TALL.
Standing in the crowd, you remember suddenly a book that you read in childhood, a collection of illustrations about different insects and other living creatures.
Nails digging into your palms, you think about the butterfly.
When you woke up on the morning of the reaping, your thoughts were as far away from the proceedings as you think they could possibly be. Seventeen, this is your last year, the year that you will finally be on the cusp of aging out and be able to start living a life that no one has ever been able to believe you capable of, a life that you have been told had to be on pause until you made it through the reapings. This is the year you will be able to convince father that he's wrong for not grooming you to take over the family business one day, that he's wrong for seeing you less as a person and more as a tool to be used.
You are more than a pretty face or an ends to a means.
"Isla," your mother says to you over the breakfast table. You know that she has something that she's excited about because she had one of the servants open a bottle of breakfast wine and poured out a glass for you, your father, and herself. "Your father and I have had a wonderful idea."
That's when you feel yourself go on edge.
"Yes," your father continues. "We've been in talks with the Kingston family and his parents agree; we think it would be good if the two of you started spending more time together."
"Why would I do that?" you reply, short.
"Oh, think of it as a business endeavor, darling," father replies.
"And he's so easy on the eyes, no?" mother adds.
And you feel like you're dying.
The butterfly, in becoming itself, obliterates the thing that it once was. There is a caterpillar. Then there is a chrysalis. Then, spreading its wings, there is a butterfly, something new, something changed.
Something stronger.
Because the thing is this: you wish that you could gut yourself, turn yourself inside out and turn yourself into someone else, anyone else, wish that you could just be allowed to prove that you are capable of revolutions, that you could be something powerful and beautiful if only the world would let you. At seventeen years old, you can feel the change settling inside of you, preparing to take your body and turn you into something else, but there is your mother and father standing in front of you trying to cut your wings from your body, telling you that your beauty needs to be given away, used as an item for sale.
No one ever told you that you couldn't want something for yourself, not in those exact words, but you internalized it all the same. You taught yourself over and over and over to me smaller, to need less, to want less, but you're standing there in the crowd and they called the name of a girl with one face on two freckled bodies and she looks so terrified out of her mind and—
You want to take her place.
You won't, not today, know that going into the games when you haven't prepared is a death wish and that you'd just be fodder for whatever career decided you looked like a good place to bury their axe, but still. The idea stirs in the back of your head for the first time; a way out, a chance to prove that you aren't just the weight of your body.
You used to think that it wasn't normal to want this much, like you were some kind of fever walking around on two legs, but this girl looks like she has never wanted anything less and it occurs to you suddenly, abruptly, like lightning in the night, that this is where you prove you are more than the object they raised you to be. They want you to be a pawn, something pretty to look at and be oogled over, the kind of thing that can be signed away to another man like a piece of property, a pretty painting exchanged between buyer and seller wherein your father is the excellent salesmen and whoever he is giving you to to marry is the biggest fucking sucker alive.
Because you don't want to be pretty.
You want to be a threat.
You remember wondering, when the caterpillar went into that cocoon, did it know that it was going to die? Did it know that it was going to experience, in a way that humans will always be desperate to understand, that strange version of impermanent death?
Does is dream about flying when it does?
Because you have.
You always have.
Nails digging into your palms, you think about the butterfly.
When you woke up on the morning of the reaping, your thoughts were as far away from the proceedings as you think they could possibly be. Seventeen, this is your last year, the year that you will finally be on the cusp of aging out and be able to start living a life that no one has ever been able to believe you capable of, a life that you have been told had to be on pause until you made it through the reapings. This is the year you will be able to convince father that he's wrong for not grooming you to take over the family business one day, that he's wrong for seeing you less as a person and more as a tool to be used.
You are more than a pretty face or an ends to a means.
"Isla," your mother says to you over the breakfast table. You know that she has something that she's excited about because she had one of the servants open a bottle of breakfast wine and poured out a glass for you, your father, and herself. "Your father and I have had a wonderful idea."
That's when you feel yourself go on edge.
"Yes," your father continues. "We've been in talks with the Kingston family and his parents agree; we think it would be good if the two of you started spending more time together."
"Why would I do that?" you reply, short.
"Oh, think of it as a business endeavor, darling," father replies.
"And he's so easy on the eyes, no?" mother adds.
And you feel like you're dying.
The butterfly, in becoming itself, obliterates the thing that it once was. There is a caterpillar. Then there is a chrysalis. Then, spreading its wings, there is a butterfly, something new, something changed.
Something stronger.
Because the thing is this: you wish that you could gut yourself, turn yourself inside out and turn yourself into someone else, anyone else, wish that you could just be allowed to prove that you are capable of revolutions, that you could be something powerful and beautiful if only the world would let you. At seventeen years old, you can feel the change settling inside of you, preparing to take your body and turn you into something else, but there is your mother and father standing in front of you trying to cut your wings from your body, telling you that your beauty needs to be given away, used as an item for sale.
No one ever told you that you couldn't want something for yourself, not in those exact words, but you internalized it all the same. You taught yourself over and over and over to me smaller, to need less, to want less, but you're standing there in the crowd and they called the name of a girl with one face on two freckled bodies and she looks so terrified out of her mind and—
You want to take her place.
You won't, not today, know that going into the games when you haven't prepared is a death wish and that you'd just be fodder for whatever career decided you looked like a good place to bury their axe, but still. The idea stirs in the back of your head for the first time; a way out, a chance to prove that you aren't just the weight of your body.
You used to think that it wasn't normal to want this much, like you were some kind of fever walking around on two legs, but this girl looks like she has never wanted anything less and it occurs to you suddenly, abruptly, like lightning in the night, that this is where you prove you are more than the object they raised you to be. They want you to be a pawn, something pretty to look at and be oogled over, the kind of thing that can be signed away to another man like a piece of property, a pretty painting exchanged between buyer and seller wherein your father is the excellent salesmen and whoever he is giving you to to marry is the biggest fucking sucker alive.
Because you don't want to be pretty.
You want to be a threat.
You remember wondering, when the caterpillar went into that cocoon, did it know that it was going to die? Did it know that it was going to experience, in a way that humans will always be desperate to understand, that strange version of impermanent death?
Does is dream about flying when it does?
Because you have.
You always have.
I'M THE TALLEST GIRL ALIVE. I'M THE TALLEST
KNIFE. NO THROAT CAN HOLD ME.
KNIFE. NO THROAT CAN HOLD ME.
Dalton Day, from “To Breathe I'm Too Thin”
