AUGGIE DAHL, DISTRICT ONE | FIN

Here the seasons don't exist
A summer held in hand
Rest while locks melt
From our doors again
Still I know we speak to not forget

( N A M E ) Augustus Xander Dahl
( N I C K N A M E ) Auggie
( G E N D E R ) Male
( A G E ) Twenty-One
( D I S T R I C T / A R E A ) District One

We were all so undone
That we couldn't think of one
My eyes won't seem to close
I don't want to see it go
It's amazingly strange

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

The slums have a way of working themselves into the very fabric of who you are after a time, turning you into a human chameleon that takes on their colors for your own in a sort of warped symbiosis that doesn't serve as a benefit other than feeling almost like comfort after a while. After twenty-one years of never knowing another way of life I could almost swear that I'm a child of the street in the most literal sense, born of the pavement and ramshackle structure that cared about me more than my own mother ever did. The shady side of town has taken me into its open arms like a prodigal son from my earliest days, weaving grit-brown into my hair (it grows thick and messy and fast like a patch of weeds and gets fairly long before I finally drag myself down the street and let Mrs. Dempsey hack it all off for a few bucks in the middle of her kitchen with a pair of pinking shears) and broken-bottle-glass-blue into my eyes, the only things about myself that I remember enough to connect me to the woman who gave my sister and I life and not a whole hell of a lot else before she dropped off the face of the planet.

A life of poverty is a sort of frenzied give-and-take. Skid row lent me its color palette, gradient smears of stubborn dirt over a pale expanse (I used to mind until I realized that my skin resembled the surface of the moon, ethereal white overlapped with artful shades of gray) in exchange for the substance of my soul body, a lifetime of malnutrition leading to short, skinny structure, five-foot-nine height and maybe tipping the scale at a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet on a good day. But everyone out here looks the same; wasted bodies and protruding ribs are so distinctive that the poor see them as simply the mark of our bretheren. And are we truly family, the collective children of destitution? I can never be quite certain, we help each other to our feet and push each other down into the dirt all in one fell swoop, simultaneously living in dual modes of community spirit and survival of the fittest. My view of family has become so warped that I can never seem to answer that question, but if it's true then we certainly have some terrible sibling squabbles.

The signs of a lifetime of fighting are etched into every part of me. Fighting for anything and everything, food, shelter, safety, all played out over chapped knuckles and ragged nails, lean structure wrapped in the lingering musculature of training that wasn't so much for the Games as for survival. I'll be the first to admit that I probably punch a lot of things that I shouldn't, and my body has taken the toll, brittle bones that have been broken too many times prone to revisit their history at the slightest provocation. Adversely, I've been on the receiving end of someone's wrath innumerable times, evident in a crooked nose from a bad break that never healed right, starkly contrasted from prominent cheekbones that have borne a thousand bruises in every shade. I'm a canvas for the world's fury as well as my own, painted anew with every loss of composure and descent into a darkness that feels almost like an old friend.

Purple-blue shadows of sleeplessness that haven't dissipated in years sit constant and heavy beneath my eyes, evidence of nightmares that haunt and dreams that taunt past the point of sacrificing my sanity in exchange for rest. Everything I've lost lurks at the back of my mind, present but manageable until my subconscious gets hold of it, and most nights it's just easier to climb up on the roof and trade sleep for hours of staring at the endless sky, letting the stars reflect the scar-constellations all over me, connecting the dots of a world that doesn't make sense anymore.

In this city's callowness
We've lost our innocence
Cheek to cheek but
My maps are changing
Oh, don't forget

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

There are worse things I could be than a dreamer and a stargazer, and as it turns out I'm all of those worse things anyway in addition. While it's true that I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night, there are plenty of other things in the world to be afraid of. Like myself. I've always heard that people are the products of their environment, and maybe that's true. I wouldn't know because I've never known another way of living besides this, never known anything besides the constant state of calm before the storm, that moment of tremulous peace before everything explodes. It's not so much that I have anger issues as it is that I have issues in general. Balance is something I've never known, and most of the time it's too easy to solve my problems with grit and blood and shuddering bone structure. I've been fighting my whole life. What's a few more rounds?

My sister told me once (before she left; life's greatest lesson to me was that they all leave. Everyone. Always) that I was a saint with a vigilante streak. Ella knew me in a way that few people do, saw that all the anger simmering under my skin was never released without good reason. Repressed emotions can stay under for a hell of a long time before they explode, and I'd rather direct that fury at someone who deserves it. There are times when I think she got it wrong, though. I was never a saint, never will be one, too steeped in the dirt and depravity of a slumdog upbringing to rise to that sort of achievement. Even if I am on the side of the angels, it doesn't mean I'm one of them. There's too much darkness and anger and righteous indignation boiling in my blood to ever let me really be a creature of the light, but there's always that could-have-been-hope that whispers somewhere in the back of my mind that maybe one day it could happen (not yet, though. The only reason I'm still here is that heaven didn't want me and hell knew it had met its match).

Maybe that's why I've found myself drawn to the stars with a magnetic pull since I can remember, clinging to the simple, steady belief that there's more up there, whole galaxies combusting into a cataclysm of fiery ruination that won't really be seen until long after they're gone. Maybe it's existential and too abstract for most people to understand, but I can relate. Sleep never seems to come, too many things clouding my mind and dooming me to either consciousness or nightmares (sometimes it's hard to tell which is which) and so I find it's easier to climb up on the roof and map out the heavens, connecting little dots a million light-years away that are the closest things I've got left to hope. A hobby for amateur astronomy compliments chronic insomnia perfectly; it's one of the few things in my life that ever seem to click. Trying to find my place in the sky is a fool's errand, but I never claimed to be anything else.

I was never good at words or numbers or anything that could have earned me a one-way ticket out of generational poverty, but the ability to weave stories out of stars and fathom more than most people are even capable of imagining always seemed like a good enough trade off to me, perched on a ramshackle tin roof with a cigarette dragging warm and rough over my tongue and the constant threat of falling pulling taut in my muscles and making me feel a little bit more alive. I've been known to tempt fate more often than not, after all, when you've stared death in the face and won it's hard to find anything truly exciting anymore. I'm not a thrill chaser, I don't go hunting down a rush of adrenaline because I can't exist without it, but living under ladders and sleeping with black cats is so commonplace now that it feels almost like home.

Home. Have I ever known the meaning of the word? I never seem to learn what things are, only what they aren't. The years have taught me that home is not just a place and family is not just blood (the former is too easy to lose and the latter is too easy to spill), but as for who and what all of these things that everyone seems to take for granted really are, I haven't quite figured that puzzle out yet. That's what I do with my days and nights, try to put the pieces together in a ramshackle jigsaw of a life and try to figure out where everything went wrong even though I can answer that question down to the minute-hour-second I turned my back and let things slide simply because I didn't want to see them. It's an endless task, though, a doomed failure because even if I spent the rest of my life cobbling together a portrait of an existence there will always be two pieces missing, one with a a fierce gaze and a lion's heart and the other one with steady determination and the voice of the angels that I've been wrongly informed I am one of.

I can see bits of them in the night sky sometimes, lingering in the phantom lines between stars and whispering that everything must have been meant to be broken like this, that life for us was never easy and that I should stop holding onto long-dead dreams that might suggest otherwise. Easy for them to say, nothing but memories and transient footprints in the dust whereas I'm real and alive and hurting and alone and so dreadfully undone that the only things I really have left are iridescent galaxies and old, old dreams that keep dimming over time. I used to be more than this.

I was a dreamer once, before life was a nightmare.

We were all so undone that we couldn't think of one
My eyes won't seem to close
I don't want to see it go
It's amazingly strange how we all seem to change
'Cause we were all so undone, undone

( H I S T O R Y )

I was born into a world that set me up for failure. There are all sorts of pretty myths that talk about people rising above their circumstances, but in a life of creaking floorboards and hollow bellies no one ever really expects you to be anything more. My story for the first twenty years of my life echoed that of so many others, a father I barely remembered, a mother who never cared, an entire world who wouldn't notice if I ever existed. That world was the slums, the carefully covered-up patchwork of hunger and deprivation that the privileged masses of District One like to pretend doesn't really exist. There was no steady light in that world, just small, transient pinpricks, distant stars of a hope that maybe someday things would be better. I see my life in constellations and shifting supernovas, and the brightest of them all was always my sister, Ella.

Ella... in my world of stars she was Ursa Minor, the little bear, and I was Ursa Major, the big bear, always hovering nearby with a fierce protectiveness that could shake the foundation of the universe. Three years my junior but with whole lifetimes sitting behind her eyes (you grow up fast on the streets, too fast, so fast that childhood is a term that many can't even fathom), he was constantly my motivation for wanting something better than what we had. In reality, you couldn't get much worse than what we had. My mother's face is something so rarely seen that it's blurred and faded into a lifeless monochrome over the years, a blank slate that only speaks of neglect and a bone-deep sadnes that never seems to leave. My sister and I raised ourselves more than she raised us, scrounging the gutters for food by day and sleeping in the creaky shelter of a dilapidated three-room rental house at night. When I was younger it was hard to figure out what our mother did to pay that rent, but as the years went by it became horrifyingly obvious. I can count off the number of times she left for days on end with an absent ruffle of my hair and a take care of your sister, now, Auggie,