emma izar d11 - FIN

e m m a .


"It's knowing that this can't go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we'll get forty years together
But one day I'll be gone
Or one day you'll be gone"

Those Izar boys are trouble mija. Don’t go getting mixed up with them, you’ll regret it.

That was what my mother said when I was wanting to enter the dating scene in district eleven. But that was ages ago. I’m not the same person I was back then. There’s a touch of grey running through my hair; a few lines around my eyes where there were none before, but I look in the mirror and I can still see that same no-nonsense teenager I used to be, her hair tied back prim in a ponytail, holding my schoolbooks close to my chest beneath folded arms.

Hey, Mamacita, lookin good!

That was the first time an Izar boy spoke to me. I did not give him the time of day, though I may have thrown an apple at his head. To this day, Druso insists that it was Vasco that catcalled me, and Vasco insists it was Druso. I know the answer, but it never fails to make me smile whenever the memory is brought up and they act like children in a schoolyard. Mama always said I was headstrong, and maybe she was right.

But just because I refuse to break does not mean that the wind does not cause me to bend from time to time. I won’t pretend it didn’t carve out my soul when Raquel died, because it did. I’ve never felt that hollow in my life. Have you ever seen a fish cleaned? We don’t get fish very often in district eleven.

But one year for my parent’s anniversary, my father paid extra for a live import to celebrate. I remember watching my father filet and clean it. It was a rough cut; as I said, we don’t have fish here often. But I remember watching its guts spill out as it gasped for air it could not breathe. The light died in its eyes as my father flipped it open and scraped its bones with his knife.

The day we buried Raquel, I was that salmon, bleeding out in front of a watchful crowd, unable to breathe and unable to die. And so another year passes, and another, and I count the scars on my heart as I grow older and my daughter stays forever young. It is a deep wound, but not so deep that I would neglect my other children. Sure, Emmanuel is grown and has a child of his own, and Sofia runs her own business, but in that sharp-tongued young woman I still see the little girl that refused to eat her peas and carrots unless they were separated. In that anguished young man, I see the little boy who caught fireflies to give to Raquel.

And Yani, my sweet young Yani, old enough now that the Capitol could choose to sentence her to death if they wanted to. I suppose I should be used to the feeling by now. It’s become a part of life now, one I feel I should not accept; like when the tabloids were convinced that Vasco had a mistress in district eight, or when they try to bother me with the same tired old rumor that Vasco is shacking up with Katelyn Persimmon.

Vasco does have a moral failing when it comes to that bakery she runs, but it isn’t infidelity, it is his untamable sweet tooth, as evidenced by the wrappers I find in his desk or in his back pocket when I am doing laundry. Por el amor de dios. The doctor wants him to cut back on sugar, but he always finds a way to snack in between our meals. His health has improved slightly since the illness, but not enough that I don’t worry somedays.

You see, Vasco is a dreamer. I love that about him. He sees a world where people care about each other, where a man can be taken at his word, where words are taken at face value. It is a world where people are kind. Just that. Kind. It is also not the world we live in, as I have often had to gently remind him. I will admit, I didn’t believe in my husband’s dream in the beginning, but over the years, I have grown to support it in any and every way that I can.

One man cannot change the world. But he can change a heart or two. Speak into a life. And then those two do the same, becoming four, and then eight. And so on. I think that’s what many of his opponents fail to understand; they are looking for some grand plan, a solution that can be implemented immediately. But things like this start small. It is the planting of trees whose shade many of us will never rest in.

He’s a man of the people; I know what his detractors say about him, but they only ever see one side of him. The fighter. They don’t know the rest of him like I do. How could they? They don’t know him any more than they know our children or me. All they know is the name. Izar. And the things that that name has become synonymous with.

I won’t lie. There are hard days. Reaping day. All the anniversaries of buried nieces and nephews. Raquel’s. Every election cycle brings with it underhanded political tactics and more watchful eyes from the Capitol. Somedays I just want him to sit down, to sit still, to not share himself with the people in this way. But how could I deny him that? To see the hope that he brings with him like a sunbeam touch the people around him. Somedays I want to shake him and beg him to stop before the government takes another piece of his soul.

But then I see his eyes light up, and that mischievous grin tug at the corners of a mouth covered with a mustache turning silver as he outlines a speech and then I fall in love all over again.

You were wrong Mama.

I don’t regret a thing.