Capitol // Jackal Krone

When we first came here
We were cold
And we were clear
With no colors on our skin
We were light and paper thin

( N A M E ) Jackal Ceres Krone
( N I C K N A M E S ) Jack. Jacky. Jak-Jak. Jackal the Jekyll.
( A G E ) Thirty-One
( G E N D E R ) Female
( D I S T R I C T / A R E A ) The Capitol

And when we first came here
We were cold
And we were clear
With no colors on our skin
Until we let the spectrum in

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

I breathe in and the world becomes an infinite weight within the cradle of my lungs, as if the shallow cavern of my body has been transformed into a cosmic womb. I breathe out and the release explodes into a thousand invisible stars, scattered across the peripheries of my vision and forever skirting my true line of sight. I want to follow them. Decoding their mysterious constellations, I could unravel the secrets and sins of the great beyond literally without batting an eye. Only, I never succeed in the chase. Despite flicking my eyes back and forth until my irises become a chaotic blur of translucent gray — exhaust trails of a soul attempting to travel beyond the glass sky of its own boundaries — evasion is inevitable. It seems certain that I am doomed to seek and never to find.

However, being doomed isn't nearly enough to stop me. If I can't have the heavens, I'll take the earth. With bare feet and a stubborn stance, I can march myself straight across any patch of grass or weeds, digging my toes in until they become soil-stained saints of tenacity. Nature has never felt out of my grasp — not like the distant expanse of the sky or the intangibility of another person's soul. No, there is no avoidance there. I can lay my body down in the yawning mouth of the forest and roll in falling leaves and new growth until my hair is a flaming tangle of existence itself. With my hellfire curls cocooning fragments of tree bark and the crushed wings of fallen butterflies, maybe I finally begin to cross the barriers of my own pale skin. This fragile flesh has never felt like enough for me, after all. I have always been at once too young and too old. Unsettled. Tangled up in wrong.

If ever I find the right kind of life in me, however — or even the mere potential for it — it's bound to grow up and out eventually. I'll come prepared, accompanied by the blood-hewn poppies inked across my back, curling into the quietest of spaces between my ribs and the shallow outlines of my shoulder blades. These tattoos thrive in ways that I could never: with the certainty of permanence. To burst and bloom in this way is still an aspiration of mine, even after thirty-one years of life. I feel newly born and decrepit at the same time, a swirling cacophony of agelessness that etches thin lines across my skin while simultaneously stretching it drum-tight over the concealed sharpness of my bones, my softened body hiding all sorts of secrets.

Yes, secrets. Those I have too many of and I couldn't give them a voice even if I dared. Each one seems to speak in a language I don't understand and I find myself unable to mimic them, much less decode their lilting trebles or seductively rumbling bass tones. The slightly rasping arc of sound that soars from my throat when I speak doesn't have enough power to lift those kinds of syllables into the air, no matter how well it understands the strength of insistence. Those are the tongues of demons and despite my fits of rage, I am not. I am not. I am not. I swear with all the sincerity I possess, yet rarely seem possessed by.

Ideas like these pull me down when I let them take an infectious spin through my thoughts, tugging at my spine and shoulders until I'm curling so far into myself that I feel as though my soul will be forced out of my mouth. One day, in this way, I will leave my body. I am certain of it. Perhaps that will be a relief. Maybe then I will be able to stretch myself up and up with the kind of confidence I only seem to carry in my posture when I'm brimming over with unstifled anger, thinning lips pressed into a dangerous red line. Do not cross this line, the suddenly vicious hue says, I don't know what's the matter with me, Love, but I'm burning like a chemical and you don't want to trigger this reaction. I have a volatile talent for combustion.

Everything turns black and blue in the wake of my bad days, crawling into the ensuing dawn with bruises and fresh resentment from those who refused to heed my warnings, despite the selfish prayers I whisper in the dark after each incident, hoping for solutions for my forsaken soul. ("Lay me down —") Looking into the distant eyes of Tomorrow, I always beg for social salvation from my own actions, despite knowing sunrise will inevitably paint the landscape in my grief. ("— let the only sound be the overflow.") My pleading is denied each and every time, waking to the blinding light of morning with infinity stretched out between myself and the person nearest me, words that are the opposite of forgiveness hanging in the air like the damned from the gallows, and I won't lie... I'm afraid of the solitude.

Say my name
And every color illuminates
We are shining
And we will never
Be afraid again

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

There are exactly seven devils living within me. I refuse to sanction their existence with names, the kind of acknowledgment that might summon them even more frequently into the thrumming vocal chords of my throat or the flexing tendons that guide my hands. We are at war with one another and although I've always been certain I am losing, I will not abandon myself and surrender the fight. These vicious wraiths may twist incessantly between muscle and sinew, sharpening their teeth mercilessly upon my bones, but I have teeth of my own and it is no secret that my bite is neither kind nor forgiving. These are the reasons people are always leaving me. I am just like the weather when these dizzy miscreants nip at my lungs or stomach, the ever-changing winds of my emotions turning tornadoes into acidic sunlight into hurricanes into the eye of a storm whose reprieve is never enough. People tend to hate what they can't understand. I'm no different.

Self-loathing bubbles up, regrets collecting like old friends eager to relive my darkest moments. I threw a dinner party for my sorrows once, three dozen empty chairs surrounding a banquet table of sinfully delicious food. At the precipice of twilight, the summer sky fading behind the window in a way that piqued my jealousy, I recounted all my wrongdoings in a grand speech. An apology to the man whose bed I set fire to after he tried to hold my hand at his house party last year; the plate I smashed over my sister's head in a fit when we were little; a fading memory for a woman I tried to kick in the teeth the night I almost drank myself to death over seeing an ex-boyfriend arm-in-arm with his flawless new wife. I called each transgression out like a crow harassing a girl in a garden, thinking confession might lead to absolution. However, when I awoke the next morning, sprawled out in the midst of a toppled mountain of pomegranates and apples, nothing had changed — or should I say: nothing had stayed the same. Instability reigned the same as ever and not a one of those vacant chairs looked surprised.

I've tried to shake my devils out, feet drumming the ground in a frantic sprint or fists pounding knuckles into brick walls until my hands were a splayed pulp of split flesh and cracked bones. However, they are stubborn and unyeilding, digging their claws into me even more deeply in response. Sometimes I worry that there's a piece of me that doesn't really want them to go, that doesn't want to be as stable calm and collected as everyone around me. Maybe I could push them out if I really wanted them gone... but then what would I have to keep me company? I want to be brave. I want to be a lion-hearted girl. Only, I don't know what would remain of me in the peace following this war of emotional conflict. I think I'd rather be awful than be nothing. Others may think I'm simply acting like a possessed child, but they don't realize how these impulses course through me like the beating of a second heart. They tell me I could crack my chest open, cut it out, and restart, but when the adrenaline hits, my soul soars. Given the chance, I'd only ever take half of it back.

In the end, it's not usually myself that I regret, but other people's lack of acceptance for me. In the Capitol, we thrive on individuality. I could recolor my skin fuchsia, encrust my body with diamonds, replace the strands of my hair with threads of gold, waltz down a boulevard wearing seventeen inch heels with a dress made from cats teeth and cellophane... but the thing no one here can abide is the way I smile crooked, laugh inappropriately, cry over petty things, walk wrong, talk wrong, think wrong, behave wrong. ("Shake it out, Jackal The Jekyll, shake it out.") I'm waiting for a revelation on how to get by, but I've only found that it's not here. The Capitol is a place for everything, it seems, everything except for me.

And when we come for you
We'll be dressed up all in blue
With the ocean in our arms
Kiss your eyes
And kiss your palms

( H I S T O R Y )

As a child, I was infamous for throwing tantrums that would rage for hours, only to dissolve into laughter and end with a serene, yet red-eyed, smile. I remember the way my mother seemed to match me at first, following my emotional progressions yell for yell and tear for tear. "Jackal Ceres Krone," her voice had a sharp-edged snap to it that I learned to mimic perfectly over the years, "now you had better settle down right this instant." Pausing, she would reign her voice in, panicked eyes flicking side-to-side to make sure no one was watching; the worst offense was always when someone witnessed one of my fits. "Why can't you be as well behaved as your brothers? When we get home, mark my words, you can be sure I'm going to —"

My father had the same dull gray eyes as I have and whenever my mother looked into them, they seemed to draw all the fight right out of her like a cosmic lacuna sucking up the glittering life-dust of her personality. So when we would finally arrive home, the door clicking shut in a way that might sound like a cue for doom to other children, I wasn't ever afraid. I knew my father would be there to greet us and sway my mother into a calm. She was an ocean in the moon-tide of his arms, lulled back and forth by the gentle waxing and waning of his smile. Whenever she and I were alone, I would think I could see myself in her, a quick-burning flame with a thousand unpredictable fuses, but around him I lost our connection. Kicking and screaming within the placid walls of our house, the two of them would let me fuss myself into exhaustion, patting my hair as if deaf to my cries. Often times they truly were, having soundproofed my bedroom early on in my life. "There, there, Love." No matter how wound up I was I would always eke out at least a tiny smile when she would call me Love. Those were the moments she felt most like my mother, the walls of our house transformed into the shelter of a home. "Shake it out, my little girl, shake it all out."

Time took me by the hand and tugged me through decades of awkward limbs and social mishaps, wrapping me up in the split ravine of those contradicting sentiments of public and private. I thought I would never understand the switchswitchswitch of my mother's electric gleam and subtle murmurs. Eventually I came to realize how my father wasn't taming her spark so much as he was holding her together — preventing a cataclysmic explosion — in a way that no one in my life has been able to do for me. This was also when I decided that I understood what marriage meant... and how badly I wanted that kind of unconditional acceptance turned balancing-force in my own life.

There had never been any romance for me in the creeping hands and unpredictable kisses of the men who'd tried and failed to entwine their bodies with mine in the past. Histrionic schoolyard hormones had nothing on me; my heart never fluttered from a scandalously stolen touch. Erratic impulses are the everyday mundane for me and I've so rarely wished for more of them. Maybe I won't ever be able to bring myself to be a steady and consistent calm, but I think I'd like someone else to be that stable force. They'll say what they mean, mean what they say, and every time they touch me it will be predictable. That will be so strange and new for me, that in my own backwards sort of way, I'm sure I'll never see it coming. Together we will do everything we're supposed to. Marriage and growing old together. Children—

To be a mother myself doesn't seem quite possible. Not for a woman who burns the beds of men who profess their interest with a sudden whisper and secretly intertwined fingers... If I really am something like my mother, then I can't begin to imagine how she ever stayed still long enough for my father to take her by the hand or how strong he must be to have held on when she inevitably tried to shake him off — as if he were just another devil. I might look like any other riot of outrageous technicolor tendencies, but I've never quite settled into Capitolite life like she has. What a person wants doesn't always seem to line up with who they are.

I keep looking for something to belong to: a person, an idea, or a place. There must be somewhere for me to go or, at the very least, someone with the power to hold me still; every creature in existence has a habitat, a natural home. When I learned that, I gathered the idea up and tucked it away as deeply within me as I could, cherishing it like a promise for salvation. It wasn't like people's throwaway words about my tantrums being an easy kind of choice. No, this was biology — Science — and I took it to heart as if it were my new religion. My family was surprised that I took an interest in environmental science, but it felt like one of the few times something actually clicked into place within me. After all, I'm not so much studying habitats as I am looking for my own.

Nature doesn't judge a person in the same way people do. It can be calm or it can rage with a single-minded viciousness that wants nothing more than to tear out all your tenderness, but it never builds a hierarchy out of these sentiments. It's just life. The first time I plunged into the forest, branches blotting out the sky until the mountains tugged back the skittering green tapestry of leaves to reveal the opposite of buildings and everything I'd ever been told about Civilization — my heart skipped more than a beat. It leapt from my body and went twisting through the open air as a shimmering astral projection of discovery. I don't understand why anyone ever felt the need to bulldoze and pave over that kind of beauty, killing forests and animals for the sake of concrete and asphalt, only how that feels more wrong than anything I've ever done.

And when it's time to pray
We'll be dressed up
All in gray
With metal on our tongues
And silver in our lungs

( C O D E W O R D ) Odair
( F A C E C L A I M ) Florence Welch

Say my name
And every color illuminates
We are shining
And we will never
Be afraid again

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

Spectrum by Florence + The Machine

Demeter in the Prometheus plot

There are a billion and one snippets of and references to Florence lyrics in this. I only wish I had those kinds of words in me. All the credit in the world goes to her, however.

And when we come back
We'll be dressed in black
And you'll scream my name aloud
And we won't eat and we won't sleep
We'll drag bodies from their graves

( S P E A K I N G ) CD5E55
( T H I N K I N G ) A26E59
( T E X T ) 72BA7A
( O T H E R ) A3C974
( O T H E R S P E A K I N G ) EEC970

Say my name
And every color illuminates
We are shining
And we will never
Be afraid again