Would You Leave the Light On? [10 Yrs / 80th Reunion]

q u e s t

Oh, if you keep reaching out
Then I'll keep coming back
And if you're gone for good
Then I'm okay with that

Do you know they have fucking perfume bottles in capitol bathrooms?

Like – I’m not sure if it’s so that their shit literally doesn’t stink, or that they want to be able to walk out of here smelling like some cluster bomb of flowers but there’s little gold bottles lined up along the marble countertop. Part of me wonders if they gave up on interior design when it came to putting gold on everything, or maybe if the venue had just decided opulence needed to be murdered and dragged out back when it came to finishes.

You’re probably wondering how I got here.

And if not, well – you can either sit through some interior dialogue or skip ahead to me screaming at a bunch of reporters because what would this event be except a way to show off how much we’d all changed. I’ve already heard people don’t even recognize me since I grew out my hair (not the five hours of sleep a night or packs cigarettes or other dabbles in excess).

I wonder if it was even the right decision to show up.

Don’t get me wrong: I want to see who’s turned into a total car crash and who’s got their shit together. I wouldn’t mind getting Shy into a headlock and choking him out for old time’s sake. Or discovering whether the innocent sheen had worn off Carmen after all this time. Had district living worn the rest of them down into the nobodies they’d though we’d become?

That’s always been the conceit of our games. That at twelve or eighteen we’d put our skin back on and wander out the cave to find everything the same. Only one of us had gotten the crown, and even then so many people had whispered about it being tarnished because of the rest of us lived, felt like it’d been another hurtful design. But the rest of us were meant to go on living, to discover that hell is other people. Our world was sawdust and smoke, a pale imitation of what we’d gotten to taste for two weeks in the capitol.

And we weren’t any richer coming home, not by a long shot.

My parents had sold my things and already bought an urn (my father would’ve never sunk money into a headstone). So I got to start over with a handful of clothes and an empty apartment and the god damned determination that no matter what the fuck I’d been handed, I wasn’t going to let them win.

I guess the games had a way of teaching us all lessons. I’d laughed about how kids seemed so at peace when they’d died, as though they could finally understand why dying might’ve been a better option that going on.

But it’d taken me a few years, some therapy, a couple of good friends and hard work to realize that the only thing that I could ever truly do was live the way I wanted, odds be damned.

I could’ve just ripped up the invitation, though. Ether had told me that there’s no real reason for me to go with the travel restrictions lifted between the districts. Each of us could see each other whenever we wanted, so why would not just organize something ourselves? And I told him to mind his damn business because he was too fucking smart. Damn kid went to college and runs circles about me in the common sense department, I swear.

When I read how it’d been ten years, it’d set out a sort of – pang?

I talked a lot about in therapy, that trauma set a part of that seventeen-year-old girl miles away. And she’d stay there, even if I’d tried to bury her. That there’d be no erasing who she’d been, no matter how many miles I tried to run. She’s still going up in that tube, running through the vineyard, telling Shy to get his shit together, staring off those rocky cliffs. Still dying, but not because she’d thought she was on a suicide mission – she’d given up herself for something bigger and more important.

I don’t know.

I let the water run in the sink so I don’t have to hear myself or anyone outside the door, least of all what might’ve been running through my head.

Why didn’t that same girl keep better touch with everyone she’d known?

It felt like I could’ve called Fiona more. That I barely knew what Shy had gone through, no matter how much I’d rooted for him to come home safe. I hardly remembered half their names at this point, and I don’t even know if I should’ve felt like that was bad, either.

A nostalgic ache. Friendships that faded without a foundation. For the way things had never been.

There’s a lot of delusion that we’re made into better people somehow by falling apart. But trauma isn’t the source of some great spiritual awakening. Sounds like it should’ve been clear but somehow a lot of folks get taught that what hasn’t killed us made us stronger. Instead of the fact that when you’re doing everything you can to survive, scars accumulate, and need tending to.

I light a cigarette even if there’s a no smoking sign because who’s going to tell a dead woman she’s not allowed to smoke.

‘QUEST! QUEST! Care to comment on your new look?’

The whole of dance floor is white marble with gold flecks. Gold columns, overhead mirror tiles of gold – you get the idea. Fountains of champagne and waiters passing out appetizers that probably cost more than what I could make in a year just to put on a plate. A typical Capitol affair, filmed for Saturn City and likely screened on a loop.

They corralled the press into one of the boxes overhead likely to get a glimpse of all of us while keeping enough distance that they couldn’t interfere in whatever all this was supposed to be.

"Get fucked, okay?! Should I jog your memory to help recognize me?" I give them the bird and a bow.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I angle for a glass of champagne out of the fountain and wonder who else might have put themselves through the torture.