naolina.darielle.vanharlem. - district three- fin.

When I look in the mirror, I’m not sure I like what I see. Sure, I have decent features, but the fact that the garish looks that my mother has plastered onto me just make me look unnatural and somewhat strained in my appearances. I much prefer the natural look I do possess, but I’d rather not cross my mother and her intentions to get me married to some capitolite by winning a district three beauty contest of sorts. So I go along with her eccentric little things she does to my looks and allow her to dress me up as I usually look on Saturday afternoons.

My most natural you could find me at would probably be on a Monday morning, in which my short, thin hair is usually in its flat-as-flat-can-be stage. It just hangs limply, unable to do anything with it unless you take time and effort and extensions, things that I’d rather not do for myself when I’m not forced by my mother. But my hair when not exposed to these horrible things, as I’ve said, is limp and flat and rather unappealing. It’s cut short so it can be hid in wigs and so it can stay healthy through bleaching and curling and teasing. It’s thinness makes it get greasy very quickly, which I find irritating and somewhat uncomfortable when I cannot shower.

And my natural features aren’t as painted over or glossed as you’d see when my mother gets a hold of me. Naturally, I guess I’d say I’m kind of… Elfish looking. Not in the way that I have pointed ears and am going to go to the north pole to hammer down toys for everybody, but more so in the way that I have small features that are too long to be considered mouse-like. My nose is rather long, but it’s thin and perk at the same time, and I assume it’s a feature that I find attractive on myself. My cheekbones are rather high and it makes my face look thinner than most peoples in the world, giving me the impression of a somewhat oval face shape. My lips aren’t the largest, but they’re not small either, and are usually chapped to some degree because of the districts drastic temperature changes.

When my eyes aren’t coated with mascara and being covered with contact lenses, I usually wear, of all things, glasses. I don’t have terrible eyesight, I presume, I’m just a tad nearsighted. My eyes are a strange mix of hazel and brown, and it seems to change between the two depending on what I’m wearing. Reds and corals and oranges tend to bring the hazel out more, which I think is a good thing, since I do enjoy donning those colors. My eye shape isn’t large, but they’re quite prominent on my facial structure. Probably due to them being slightly slanted and almost cat-like. I know, I’m describing my features too much as things that have nothing to do with me, but it’s not my fault that I do have these resemblances. My eyes have decent eyelashes, I presume. Maybe that’s where all my hair went, away from my head and towards my eyelashes.

I find my height to be something that is quite awkward. I’m not tall-tall in the way that I’m 6’ 2’’ and towering over the other women or girls in my district, but I’m not the same 5’ 6’’ that most people who are my age and gender are. I believe I stand at about 5’ 9’’, which translates to the fact that I am tall for someone who is a female, and I don’t mind it, really. It was fun being picked in athletics during school first. Yes, even district three requires us exercise in schools, it’s just considerably less than the lower districts may be. I’m rather thin as well. I’m not talking stick thin, because I’m not some emaciated opium addict in district one who models and has emotional breakdowns and bulimia and all that. I’m more of the “Let the metabolism take care of it” type of thin, which means that most of my body weight is in my thighs, but the rest of me is lean. Of course, when I’m older, this will fade and send me into a spiral of sadness, but for now, I’ll take what I can get.

Out of costume, the clothing I prefer consists of little things. Like jeans or shorts. Sometimes paired with sneakers, sometimes with those little ballet flats that is maybe the only thing that my mother lets me wear outside of competitions that is worth some value of money. In the eyes of my mother, anything outside of media events doesn’t matter. The shirts I wear are usually white tee shirts with a jacket of some kind over it. I like my purple one especially, but that could just be me.

But the minute my mother gets a hold of me, something else happens. My hair has extentions braided into it, and those extentions are bleached, curled, pinned, sprayed and waved to a crisp, making sure that it looks as dramatic and explosive as possible. I hate it and it makes my head look like I have a Yorkshire terrier occupying it. And then the tiara that lays upon the top of my head during this unfortunate violation of having decent hair. A feather and faux-diamond tiara that I wish my mother would deem tacky and remove from my head. But she never does. It’s uncomfortable. To match the grand tiara, there is a selection of overly sequined dresses and a faux fur cape. It’s disgusting.

The makeup that’s done on my face during the competitions is rather over the top. Not in the way that is a good thing, but more to the fact that I could pass for bambi with the white spots that are drawn onto my cheeks. Too much eyeliner and the most disgusting color of lip color accompanies this, and I absolutely hate it.

I’m not my mother, and I don’t believe I will ever be. Because I’m not an idea person. I can’t take initiative and do something by myself. Honestly, it’s probably the worst trait I could’ve acquired in my lifetime. I don’t have a spine and I don’t know how to do anything by myself. I’ve had so many things made up for me in my life that nobody has ever given me an option to do anything or say anything that I’d like to do. It’s tragic that I can just sit there like an inanimate object when my mother is fussing over what I will be doing with my life when I’m older, and I guess I’ve just given up and let everybody else take the wheel. I want to do things by myself, but it’s something that I can’t do. I physically and mentally can’t do something by myself because of how I was raised. I was raised like I was a toddler up until now, in which I am not a toddler, instead I am an inanimate object my mother can mold into perfection. Which means that I can’t form ideas that are going to get me anywhere in life.

I’m a plastic Barbie doll. No, I’m not kidding you. I’m dressed up every Saturday night from the times of 5:30 in the evening to 2:00 the following morning, in which I fall asleep half-garbed and wake up uncoherent of what happened the night before. My mother believes that I need to have personal appearances in district three, so every single weekend I’m subjected to being a “Carousel Princess” one of many girls who basically compete in beauty contests in the third district if their social status is high enough. It’s a rather pathetic thing, but it’s a tradition that district three has, and my mother was once the person who was at the top of her game in it, almost being able to marry into the elite capitol statuses by winning a certain amount of these competitions, but when she broke her leg… She relies on me now. To win everything. So she dresses me up and takes painstakingly long amounts of time to preen me until I look like what I view as a freak show.

Despite my complete incapability to form any idea on what I should do for my own, I like to think I’m good at describing things. I have a rather vast vocabulary and like painting pictures with words. No, I’m not a storyteller like Estelle or whoever that weird girl in the 56th hunger games was, but I am somebody who can put images into people’s heads. I don’t know, I like describing the things I see because I really have no control over them, so I can’t change them, and if somebody else does I can adjust my thoughts accordingly. I don’t have quite the emotional charm of that aspect of description, but I do like to think that I have the ideas and visuals very straight forward when I talk.

Though, I’ve been told I’m repetitive. I do think I say the same things over and over, always trying to perfect the things that I’d been saying. If I can’t find the right wording for something, I’ll repeat it until it does find the right words. For example “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t, I don’t.” If I can’t find the right way to say I didn’t, I’ll repeat it despite the fact that it sounds wrong until it finally sounds right and I can tack another word to the end of it. I also like finding the right wordings and repeating them since they seem so pretty and rough. It’s a quirk, I guess, but it’s something I enjoy doing.

I think the one thing that I’m ever verbal about is probably the fact that I need to be on time for everything. Every single thing I do, I have to have a time and date for it, or I’ll feel like a failure and just sit there in my own anguish and wonder why I was such a failure to the human species. I love calenders and feel the need to plan every single move that I make. It’s the only thing that seems to matter to me, or at least in my mother’s eyes.

The thing is, I don’t want to end up like my father. I want to be the anti of what my father is. My father is a pushover, somebody who throws himself into a project wholeheartedly and does whatever he is told. He’s somebody who doesn’t mind being steamrolled because it’s simply something that my father is. I never want to end up like him. But somehow, I’m convinced that behind my back…. I already am.