XINDIANNE 'OWLY' GRIMOIRE :: WANDERER :: DONE

The little white pill is the colour of pure, the only beautiful thing that I can find in this world. I roll it between my thumb and finger, thinking about how awful things are here, and how amazing they are where this little tiny tablet will take me. There’s only a handful of them left in my purse now, and a little voice in the back of my head yells at me, asking what I’m going to do when I finish them, but I take another just to silence him. I cannot fathom the idea that there will be a time when that world will cease to exist. It’s like I’m a child being told to grow out of an imaginary friend, except this friend is completely real, even if it’s just real to me.

Placed carefully beneath my teeth, it bangs against dirty teeth and feels like I’ve taken the first step onto a train leading to my home. It doesn’t take long for the effects to kick in, and I start to see the world lighten, as if the clouds are thinning. Here, there are no shadows. There is black and white and the most vibrant colours, but there are no shades of grey. Here, everything is simple and perfect, and everyone I see has a grin plastered to their face and they mean what they say. The world is colours dragged behind a galloping horse, and it moves on and on so fast, spiraling in an evening sky, at first slowly so that I can hold on, but then it buck and rears, and I have to let go. It tosses me too and fro and a hit the ground hard. I sidle into this world screaming, throat raw, and for a moment the foggy grey early morning is peaceful and so there.

“Owly,” Thylia whispers, rocking my shoulders. “Owly, wake up.”

The name comes from when I was a baby, long before even people with accurate memories can call to mind. Apparently my neck was unusually short, and I’d spend hours staring noiselessly into air, reminding our mother of an owlet. And so she nicknamed me Owly- Xindianne presumably being too much of a mouthful- and so the name stuck, siblings growing up referring to me as that. I think it’s funny, really, because Owls are supposed to be good with time, but I have no sense of time at all.

I cannot remember things like I should. I don’t remember the Owly story, I’ve only been informed it. Sometimes I even get Anais and Ambrosia mixed up, because although I know the little differences between their similar faces I cannot remember which ones belong to whom. I forget where I’ve placed things, when I last ate, and they all say its to do with my pills, but it can’t be because when I’m in their world my mind is perfect, just like everything else there.

When I’m stuck in this world for too long, my body starts to shake. It’s like it cannot physically handle the weight of all of the hurt that lies here. It rips at my stomach and messes with my mind- as if it needed more messing with. And I start to cry and I know that bitter-lemon tears will do nothing to sweeten this side, but I cannot help myself. And so I pop another pill and it takes me to a better place. The sensible part of me tells my self that I should wait it out, become less attached to the world that I know is, when I run out of tablets, going to die, but the rest of me wants to forget. I could be dead tomorrow, for some unknown reason, and so I stay in my world and forget. I forget.

I seem to be good at forgetting.

My name is Xindianne Seeta Crimoire and I desperately need to find the colour before I get lost in the grey.

When I was but a small child, pudgy fingers pressuring my gums and fat rolls restricting my knees, my eyes were maps of the world. You could look into them and read the whole future, read how I was always destined to create my own earth, but because no one ever pays attention to children, no one ever did. Perhaps, had they looked for the answer then, before the question was asked, they would have solutions stuck under their fingernails.

Now, they have mixed with sludge and soot and dirt and have faded to grey. I haven’t actually seen them, can’t actually remember them, but I know that, like everything else in this world, they are grey. Sometimes I like to pretend that they’re an ice blue, that there’s something of mystery about them, but I’m lying. They refer to lies as a web, but I’m the worlds worst spider because I forget which strands are sticky and which are not, and I get entwined and cocooned and I end up drinking my own blood. I lie a lot, only I don’t know if they’re lies if I can’t remember whether or not I believe them. But, anyway, I grew up, and I lost the charts in my eyes and no cartographer had created an atlas with them, and now I cannot find my way. And I think, if only I could remember what those maps said, if only I could some how recreate them, draw them with a stick in the sand, maybe I could reunite the two worlds I live in and make my way back to the road once more. Or was it a road that I once travelled along? Perhaps it was a dirt path, made by animals, or a set of tracks I had to work hard to find. Perhaps it was nothing at all and I’m only wishing that I once had a bearing in my fog, but that’s the problem- I can’t remember.

I can remember a table. My sisters laugh and say that I’ve ruined all the memories of what was once our home (although I don’t believe that word ever had meaning,) but I can remember that table, and I can remember everything about it. My untamable bramble-tangle of hair did not reach above its long legs yet, so I could not have been very old. The day it arrived it was entombed in plastic that smelt like it stuck it’s hands deep into the back of my head and felt like marbles in my mouth. Straight from district Seven, it was, finest craftsmanship and costing a small fortune. But a small fortune was nothing compared to our very large one.

Someone had spent a very long time creating a world in this table. Its legs had doors and windows and branches and if I closed my eyes and bit the left side of my lip, I could almost live there too. No one else saw. Everyone else was too tall, too busy to gaze into worlds that sort-of-but-didn’t-really exist. But I spent hours under that table, living protected in the world in its legs and not in the world outside where one had to grow up.

So you see, I’m not stupid. It’s not that I cannot remember anything about the life that I once pouched in child-cheeks, nor have I tried to forget it. There are certain things, however, that are drowning in a lukewarm sea and I try my hardest to play lifeguard, to fish them out, but sometimes they are just too far gone.

I can’t remember my mother. I can remember that she smelt like pink grapefruit and that she had a pair of sandals that looked a little like star fruits, but I cannot remember who she was and what she did. She was real; I know she was real, because people in both my world and this world speak of her. They say that I should remember the tree I was once an acorn underneath, but she is not there. She’s a drift of fragrance and a drab of color but no memory strong enough to emote. I’d like to remember her, I really would. I recall remembering her, too, on a day where the sky was a pressing decision and unease was seasickness in my stomach, but now she is a ghost, except I could not tell you whether she was alive or not.

My past is all like her. I know that something is bona fide when it features in both of my worlds. Few things can I actually grab onto, most of it just being scraped by my fingernails as it cloud-cruises past. When something is wrapped in my sticky hands, I try my hardest to keep it there, holding it like a bird- loose enough for it to breathe but tight so that it cannot fly away. My fingers, however, don’t seem to grip properly, and the wretched creature escapes and takes flight and wings it’s way towards a burning sun.

So I guess, for me, all that matters is there here and now. I have sisters, so many that they spill onto my second hand. They’re different in each of my worlds, but mostly they are flawless. It’s only when I am here that I can see how weak and raw they are. We live in a tangled net of trees and weather and outside, and it scares me because I am running out of that magic medicine that takes me into the better world. It seems as if I am moving here for good, and I don’t want to. Here, I am meant to remember and I cannot. Here, people are balls of clay earth and can be hurt and disfigured- they already are- and that scares me. Where I come from, where I live most of the time, people are perfect, I am perfect. I wish it could stay like that.

I cannot remember what I look like.

My face has become consumed in the fog, the sea of everything that has ever passed, and like everything else it has disappeared. Like a bling beggar-man, I can run my fingers over my high cheek bones, feel tongues of skin sagging under my eyes, squeeze wide-brimmed nostrils. I don’t know what they look like any more, but I know what they feel like. I can see that my body is getting skinnier by the day, because surely in the Capitol I was fat, and now in this haze of forest where my diet is mostly emotion, I am thin, frail.

My nails are very long. I know that because I can compare them against the other girls, and mine are always the longest. And I know that my hair is the colour of tree bark- at least, it is where it frames my face- and that when I try to run my hands through it, I cannot, because it is knotted as if a family of robins has tried to make their nest there. But that’s all I can see of myself, that and the very end of my nose. Why, I couldn’t even prove to you that I have a face.