jessa love, district seven ; fin cb

I was a killer before a daughter,
an omen rather than a serendipity.

I've become content with this fact. After sixteen years of it being hammered into my skull, of it being cross-stitched into the soft fabric of my skin just so I'd never be able to forget what I'd done, I should be. Not that it makes it any easier, no. Killing your mother before she had the chance to look at your newborn face, at blessing you with a name, is like swinging on a trapeze with the world's weight shackled to your wrists.

It's not living, rather trudging through quicksand and waiting for the moment the darkness swallows you whole. My time hasn't yet run out, though, despite the days I stared up at the sky and wished to be struck down by the lighting rumbling in the clouds. I know my father has prayed for that too. I can see it in his weathered face and in his overcast eyes, the silent hatred lingering in every crease and gaze. And I wish I could blame him, scream at him with all the force in my lungs and cry until those rivers run dry and then suddenly I'm numb. Too insensate and deadened, become a shell of a girl, to feel anymore.

But I can't blame him.

When I look in the mirror that's been cracked a hundred times over from my wild fist, I see variants of myself in the glass spiderweb. A girl with cherry-red bows in her hair and a smile that could span the universe, the girl I could've been. And then I see who I truly am - sunken skin and dead eyes, I should've been buried long ago. I see someone unlovable. But I guess there's still a shard of myself that clings onto the dream that I can still be that girl with a happy family and a sense of liveliness. A part of me still hopes, maybe that's enough.