Ella Dahl, Wanderer

x | x

Yes, a heart will always go one step too far
Come the morning and the four corners I see
What the moral of the back story could be
Come with me, go places

( N A M E ) Ella Wren Dahl
( A G E ) 18
( G E N D E R ) Female
( D I S T R I C T / A R E A ) District One Wanderer

And a heart will always stay one day too long
Always hoping for the hot flashes to come
For the glue to dry on our new creation
Come with me, go places

( A P P E A R A N C E )

Ever wonder what the wreckage of youth looks like? I'm not sure when I stopped being a child, only that I grew up too soon. Somewhere between now and then, I ceased to be my mother's little girl and became the daughter of destruction — or was that self-destruction? Everything just... happened. I'm still not sure how, but I can feel it, no, I can see it reflected in myself. It's in the irony of my colorless skin, anything this white is supposed to be innocent, and even the blue of my eyes. So pale, as if my soul has been sucked right out of them.

I used to be pretty... for a street rat. That's what Zane told me, anyway. These streets can't touch you, Ella, you're indestructible. I believed him then, washed the dirt from my body as if that were enough to make me clean again. No one ever told me about the stains you can't wash away, a kind of ugly that you can only hide with a smile for so long, but eventually you learn these things on your own. I did. Maybe if he had told me that, if he hadn't made me believe I could do anything I wanted and still be the same person, maybe I would have stayed indestructible. And happy. I forget that I used to feel that way once.

I was genuine and radiant, with the kind of idiot-grin you only have the first time you discover love. I had dimples. In breathless moments, my heart would contract so tightly that I thought I was dying. He would kiss me back to life and I would blush. No one would believe that now. Impossible. The girl with the permanent sneer who could cut you with the sharp arch of an eyebrow — no. Not her. She wouldn't, even if she could. Sometimes I wonder if they're right. If Zane and I could stop being like strangers, even for a moment, would I smile at him the way I used to? Would I blush if he smiled back? I'm not sure. The only direction my lips seem to curve is down and I've been stripped so empty, so vacant and hollow, that I'm not sure I have enough blood circulating through my body to flush my cheeks anymore.

For now, all those things are gone, replaced with the hardened features of survival. I am the clenched fists and watchful eyes of a predator. Just because I am no longer invincible, doesn't mean I'll let you destroy me. Only Zane and I get to do that. Don't even try. I'm 5'6", but if you cross me, I'll straighten my spine until I'm ten thousand feet tall. Too high even for the trees to touch me. Higher than Tiva. Tiva—

She is the woman who cuts the broken ends of my hair away, turning the frayed brown edges smooth again. Sometimes I let her comb the tangles out, her gentle fingers loosening knots and hushing me when I start to protest. I don't like people, but she feels more like home than any house I've ever lived in. She was there when Zane was not enough to save me. Her motherly touch mends the damaged parts of me and fills me with this awful hope that I'm not completely gone yet.

Come hell or full circle
Our arms fill with miracles
Play hearts, kid, they work well
Like classics play aces
Stay with me, go places

( P E R S O N A L I T Y )

Tiva is... like a tree. Steady. Rooted to this wilderness. She belongs here. She is a tree that walks and talks, that wraps her limbs around me even when I'm screaming at her to leave me alone. Especially then. Those are my bad days, when Zane and I can't even look at each other because we're so terrified of ourselves, of our past, of the future... and we still refuse to admit anything has changed between us. It has. But I can't give him up yet and he's not cruel enough to make me, even though he's merciless enough to pretend he thinks I mean it when I shriek at him not to touch me. He knows how desperately I want to sob into his chest, for him to gather me in his arms and convince me it's still a place where I belong. Tiva isn't like that. She doesn't run from me when I gnash my teeth like a feral animal or play make-believe with my emotions.

After my tantrums subside, she's still there, murmuring stories learned from the earth or humming a meditative drone that lulls me into a calm. When I don't understand her stories, she shows me pictures: hand-painted oracle cards, or so she calls them, bent and frayed by time and use. They are so strange. I never quite understood what they were for, so of course, because she is Tiva, she gave them to me and told me to find out. When I requested for her to teach me, she said to ask nature instead and look within myself, that my own negativity was hiding the truth from me. Evidently it hides a lot of truths from me, because I can read no fortunes, no futures, in these cards. Still, she told me I am The Barefoot Whale Rider — showing me the image of someone saddled to the back of a whale swimming through air instead of water — that I may have been displaced from my home, but that I was a survivor. No matter what is taken from you, Ella, you will find a way to continue on. If ever you can't, you will create a new way. I want so badly to believe her words, but then I see Lydia and the way Zane looks at her like I wish he still looked at me, and I can't.

Lydia is the Death card. I know this not because its painted piece of paper whispered the secrets of fate to me, or even because I daydream about her dying or simply going away, but rather because the future is completely unfathomable to me. She is the end of something and I am helpless to prevent it. I hate her for it. I don't think she will ever understand, but Zane does. Sometimes I see the guilt in his eyes and, although it seems like there's always guilt of one kind or another within the two of us, this kind is different from the rest. It is not a past kind of guilt, but a present kind. Secretly, I hope it makes him feel like he's burning alive inside. I don't want to feel this way alone; I want him to feel it with me. It's only fair for all three of us to be burning, even if Lydia is the only one with scars on the outside of her body.

Then again, maybe it's justice if I burn alone. Lydia escaped her fire and Zane has always run from the things that destroy me from the inside-out, the problems he can't fix with his fists or insistent words. Everything is my fault anyway. When you get down to it, I am why the two of us ran away from District One and I am what we were trying to leave behind. There's a reason he abandoned me for her: She is nothing that I am and I am everything she is not. While I am thoughtlessly impulsive, overflowing with petty jealousy and pessimism, she smiles even when she's miserable. I don't know how to do that; I only know how to lash out at the world. At the people I love most. Like Zane. He was the only person I had left from One, but now he is Lydia's and the only thing I'm left with is a mirror. That damned mirror that shows me all the reasons I hate myself.

Yes, a heart should always go one step too far
Come the morning and the day winding like dreams
Come the morning every blue shade of green
Come with me, go places

( H I S T O R Y )

I was born with enough excuses to despise District One, that even as an infant, I could have justified a lifetime of self-pity. Only I didn't care. Skid row was home, with all of it's carefully crafted patchwork shacks, like quilts to keep us warm as we slept, so it never mattered how hard up we were. I wasn't just another slumdog, like Zane and my older brother Auggie, I was queen of the slumdogs. When I stood on the rooftops with my triumphant fists in the air, the other children didn't just look up to me because I was standing on higher ground. I was a force to be reckoned with, if only in my own head, in a place where everyone was inherently powerless. That meant something back then.

The three of us didn't grow up together so much as we grew into one another, braiding our fingers into hand holds and promises for a future we weren't destined to have. Auggie and I were inherently close, the way only siblings can be, but our bond with Zane was as inseparable as if we couldn't tell the difference between friend and family. It wasn't until after... everything... that I wondered if Zane used to feel a separation between us and him, a blood divide he could never cross. Maybe that was why the two of us bound our bodies together in the one way Auggie never could.

One day I was a child, trailing my fingertips against neighborhood buildings as I walked to school, wondering if leaving my fingerprints on something could make it mine, and the next I was a teenage girl with my hands pressed against his bare skin, knowing I'd been right. Each touch gave a piece of ourselves to the other, until I couldn't remember where I began and he ended. We never talked about it, refusing to name what it was we had become, worried that if we called it something other than what we'd always been, that we'd be giving all that up. Loss had never been something we were very good at.

It wasn't long after that I noticed the change in the way Zane looked at me. It reminded me of Auggie and the expression that would cross his face when I'd cut my foot on a stray piece of glass while running barefoot or stumble over my own limbs and scrape my palms against the pavement. Zane had crossed the final barrier that had separated us and discovered what he'd been missing out on: how when someone becomes an inextricable piece of you, you feel their pain as if it were your own. The next thing I knew, we were training like careers, teaching ourselves to fight as if brute force would be enough to protect each other from all the dangers of the world.

Every accidental bruise on my body seemed to give him a scar within his own, but we still couldn't bring ourselves to admit what we were to each other with words. Those moments of pain became all the proof we had and I felt each one like the rush of an addiction. So when a stranger stopped me on the street and told me I was beautiful enough that he'd give me anything if I would let him touch me for a night, I replied yes, please destroy me. Just leave a mark, so he knows what you've done. I closed my eyes so tightly, as if I could block it all out until the only thing I remembered would be the lingering destruction to my body, to my soul. In the moments of inescapable reality, I pretended he was you. Afterward, when he gave me a jeweled mirror, more valuable than the collective worth of everything I had ever owned, I began to realize what I'd done. In its reflection, I could no longer find the vibrant girl who had once ruled a gang of slumdog children with little more than an excess of youth.

None of this was enough to stop me. Zane's jealousy not only fed my terrible addiction, but his silent pain over it damaged me even more, caging us in an infinite loop of exquisite ruination. Whenever I felt the fierce edge of possessiveness begin to ebb from his kiss or a slackening of the plaintive hold that begged me not to leave him, I found myself on the doorstep of that strange man. Each time, I promised myself this is the last time, but soon the choice wasn't mine anymore. Every visit was a little more honest than the last, a little less gentle. Too many of his fingerprints were tattooed across my body and I lost the right to say no, please don't hurt me anymore. Even I can't find pleasure in this much pain. But my pleasure wasn't what he paid for and he loved my pain even more than I did.

When the last time finally came, it came with a knife. By then, I wasn't exactly unfamiliar with his... quirks, but there's sexual sadism and then there's straight up torture. I think we had both crossed that line long ago, but while I kept my abuse of Zane firmly in emotional territory, this hedonism was of the more physical variety. When the polished metal of the weapon flashed with his sinister intentions, my career training kicked in as I turned the blade on him and fled. Running away was always my forte, unlike dealing with consequences.

I didn't know I was being followed. When they broke the front door down, I was huddled in Zane's arms, covered in that awful man's blood, as Auggie nursed his bruised fingers after losing a bare-knuckle boxing match with a wall while listening to my explanation. My brother was a saint with a vigilante streak. So when those cronies came looking for their boss man's revenge, he welcomed them — with both his fists and a two-by-four. All I remember is the blood and the way Auggie's body lay mangled on the floor after he was killed, his broken limbs intertwined with the slaughtered figures of our attackers. Otherwise, it's just a blur of running, running, running, always running, and how difficult it was for Zane to hold onto my hand with all that slick blood on our palms.

The forest hid us from the law, but not from our guilt. As with everything else, we avoided talking about what had happened. We were avox mute and stranded on opposite sides of a new divide, finding it difficult to so much as touch each other anymore. Even in my most selfish moments, I know I am not the only one who lost a brother that day, but I still can't admit that aloud. It's always my brother, not our brother, that I scream about during my violent paroxysms; Zane must hate me for that, for disowning him in my fits of displaced rage. Those pieces of Auggie we had woven into our souls went with him, leaving hollow places in our bones, carved by the kind of persistent sorrow that only knows how to cripple. Grief and starvation whittled our bodies away until we became savage ghosts, wandering the wilderness, seeking redemption and never finding anything but trees.

By the time we stumbled into that hallowed clearing, we were one step shy of death and miles past our breaking point. I thought Tiva was a mirage, a fever dream brought to life by my famished desperation, but my other hallucinations possessed none of her kindness. Her healing hands tended our wounds and pressed offerings of food into our hesitant palms. Zane and I spoke for the first time since fleeing District One, our voices rasping with disuse, answering all of her questions as long as they didn't pry into what we were trying to escape. All the food and medicine in Panem couldn't have convinced us to confess our sins.

Slowly, we began to remember we were alive. Weeks passed as the gypsy woman coaxed us back from the grave and one day Zane and I finally made eye contact without breaking our gaze away in shame. My heart was a rabbit snared in the palpitations of its own panic, but refused to burst — not when we had come this far. The next time our fingers brushed by accident, neither of us flinched. Silent nods grew into single syllable answers into awkward strings of jumbled words into nervous sentences. We were reteaching each other the art of conversation, asking questions we already knew the answers to, just to hear the other speak.

The two of us had been hunting when we discovered the fence and although the district was not our own, we couldn't repress the way it reminded us of where we had come from. I'm not sure how long we stood in stillness before Zane pointed at the fragile shacks in the distance and whispered, they look like ours, like the rooftops you used to stand on. I don't know if it was his acknowledgment of the past, the word ours, or knowing he still thought about me, but my whole body went as numb as it had the first time he'd kissed me all those years ago. My hand trembled nervously as I reached out to weave my fingers into his — to tell him how sorry I was, that no matter how much I hated myself I would never hate him, how some terrible part of me was glad we were alive even though Auggie died protecting us — but he shifted away before I could reach him, distracted by an unconscious figure in the grass.

Lydia. The Death card. The end of Zane and I. The thief who not only stole my courage to say the things that could have brought us back together, but who took Zane away from me, took the only person I had left, took a part of me. Selfishly, I think that's what bothers me most. That Zane will always possess those pieces of me that I gave him once upon a better time and whenever he touches her, I feel it as if I'm right there with them, burning from his betrayal. Like a premonition, I knew from the moment he picked her up and carried her back to Tiva, that she would come between us. Zane always had a weakness for wounded things.

Maybe he doesn't understand why I hate her, why I wish she would go back to her own life instead of intruding on ours, or how him loving her makes me an outcast and how horrible that feels. If he did, I'm not sure I could forgive the way he scolds me for my impulsive outbursts, even though my words are laced with the unspeakable things from our past that we were never supposed to give a voice to. I cling to this idea, to the thought that the reason we're not together now is due to misunderstandings. The alternative would be too much for me to bear: that he doesn't remember what he loved about me.

Come one now, come all ye
This story breaks free here
Tales from the back pages
From somewhere, en scena
Deus ex machina

( C O D E W O R D ) Odair
( F A C E C L A I M ) Taylor Warren

( C O M M E N T S / O T H E R )

Zane Utimio
Lydia Samuels
Tiva Aishe

Go Places by The New Pornographers

Come hell or full circle
Our path blocked but sure we'll
Make records, then set them
Make copies, win races

( O T H E R ) 525C70
( T H I N K I N G ) 6B546B
( T E X T ) 86868D
( O T H E R S P E A K I N G ) 8EA2A2
( S P E A K I N G ) ABC3B5

Stay with me, go places
Once more for the ages