lucia williams, d12

I hardly knew her.

She was the child of the affair, the product of my father's mistakes and infidelity. Her mother was barely legal. It was rumoured she was even a prostitute. My mother was seven months pregnant when she opened our front door to another woman, her eyes drooping with starvation and poverty, begging for some solace from the Seam lifestyle. Her stomach was rounded in contrast to her tiny frame.

My mother gave her a slice of bread and she was never seen again. My older brother, barely a teenager, watched from the doorframe as the young woman disappeared into the night. the reflection of the moon danced off her pale skin. He said he wasn't sure if starvation would take her and her unborn child, if she would be another product of the desparity that haunted our district.

I was eleven when Sinead stopped coming around for weekend visits. I learned later her eyes were a mirror image of her mother's, the pleading and desperate ones that came to visit my mother that one fateful evening, the least subtle reminder of the unfaithfulness that haunted my mother each day. I never saw her again until I watched her shadow creep up the stage at the Reaping, her anxiety reeling into the crowd below as everyone knew that our District would not be seeing another victor this year.

Dad always told me he admired how strong I was, and that was how he knew I would survive in this world. I was ten years old when he pulled me aside as Sinead and I played, and told me the Seam would eat you alive if you showed any signs of weakness. And maybe he did it subconsciously, or maybe he did it on purpose, but his eyes narrowed towards his youngest child as he said so. 

And I didn't want to be weak. So I became everything she wasn't. I learned how to survive on my own - to look out for myself, because God knows my parents couldn't do it for me. My skin was toughened - calloused and scarred with the trauma of living in the Seam. Yet the same woman who was skin and bones on our front porch seventeen years ago managed to provide enough for my little sister - enough to afford the privilege of protecting and sheltering her from the outside world.

And I knew it too - I knew it from the moment Sinead and I first talked about our brother's death. She was enamoured with his story - with his noble sacrifice for the boy he loved, how he lived and died for him, and how she so desired to feel love like that one day. 

All I could think about was how sad it was. He saw nothing so bright in his life that he was willing to throw it all away to protect his love - he saw life as something not worth living enough on its own without Sage. And for that I felt nothing but pity. 

Perhaps they had more in common with each other than I did. And that's probably why they died and I didn't. I survived because I chose to survive - I chose to advocate for myself, to do what I could to live a life worth living.

And I intend to keep it that way.

for what once was.

LUCIA.