LARK KEENI, D6 // DONE

I wish I were pretty, I wish I were brave
If I owned this city then I'd make it behave
And if I were fearless then I'd speak more truth
And the world would hear this
That's what I wish I'd do, yeah

( N A M E ) Lark Idris Keeni
( A G E ) Sixteen
( G E N D E R ) Female
( D I S T R I C T / A R E A ) District Six

If my hands could hold them, you'd see
I'd take all these secrets in me
And I'd move and mold them
To be something I'd
Set free

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

In a world where everyone has to grow up too fast, I'm an overgrown child.

It's something I hear more often than you'd expect, the words either laced with fondness or shot through with acid and followed up by the demand to just grow up already. But it's hard to grow up when neither my mind nor my body wants to let me, always trapped in a five-year-old's fever dream Neverland of adventure and no consequences. Even at sixteen I'm built like a little girl, five-foot-three and skinny all over, all long, coltish limbs with knobby knees and elbows that are perpetually scraped or bruised from the impact of life - Despite the fact that I'm as quick and agile as a monkey once I'm off the ground, I can't hardly take two steps without tripping over my own feet. I don't even have a woman's figure like I should by this point, no curves warping my body into a convex-concave hot mess of puberty that I wouldn't know how to make heads or tails of. Good thing, too. All that getting knocked out of proportion would probably throw my balance right off.

I feel like I was meant to live up in the trees like some sort of wild thing (that's what Mama always called me, my real Mama, not Mama Nina, her heathen little wild thing), hands all roughed-up by bark and dirt under the nails but still built clever, quick fingers and a steady grip. My feet were never made to walk, big, clumsy, the arches so flat that sometimes my ankles roll inwards and I stumble and hit the ground before I even know what I'm doing, but my whole body was made to climb, flexible in all the right places and strong without ever looking it. If I could swing through life like a trapeze artist, free as a Lark bird and so high that the ground was nothing but a memory, it would be all I could ever ask for. Up in the trees and on the rooftops, there's never anyone to force you to grow up.

People always tell me that I ought to dress more like a girl, but girl clothes make it hard to climb and it's not like Mama Nina can afford to buy all of us nice clothes anyway. Usually I just raid Robin's closet, old jeans and loose shirts and beat-up old shoes when I absolutely have to wear them, although most of the time I'm barefoot, feet all cut-up and dirty but much better than being cooped up in stuffy leather and laces. One dress for the Reaping, secondhand and faded and just about my least favorite thing in the world, but I've been told when I clean up I can shine like a new penny.

Sometimes I wish I were pretty. Not the work-for-hours-just-to-look okay kind of pretty, but the just-rolled-out-of-bed-perfect kind like Gypsy and Persia, the kind of pretty that makes people stop and stare and go wow, she's something. I know I'm something, that I can climb higher and faster than anyone I know and that I can sing and that Robin says I'm his favorite sister, but even if I am something I don't look like it, big nose and boring brown eyes and a mess of dirt-brown hair that gets thrown up in a ponytail or else runs wild down my back in crazy waves. But my smile is nice, a little crooked but so bright I could light up the sky sometimes. No one in my house ever smiles, and sometimes it just feels so dark inside those walls that I wish I could climb high enough to catch the sun and bring a piece back for all of us to share. Trees have limits, though, and even the rooftops aren't tall enough for me to chase the light and escape an adulthood that's slowly catching up with me.

I want to darken in the skies, open the floodgates up
I want to change my mind, I want to be enough
I want the water in my eyes, want to cry until the end of time
I want to let the rain come down, make a brand new ground
Let the rain come down tonight

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

I want to touch the sky someday.

Climbing's an odd hobby to have, but my last name is Keeni so it's okay for me to be odd. There's a sort of security in being at the highest point in any given space, a satisfaction in getting there that just speaks to me, make me feel like I have a place in the world. Everyone else has gotten used to it, never phased by how they can walk through the living room and have a whole conversation with me as I'm casually perched on top of the big bookshelf beside the TV, how in the mornings Robin has to wake me up for school by opening his window and shouting up to the roof because I always find a way to clamber up there to sleep. It's easier to breathe when I'm near to the stars, and the closer I get to the ground the more uneasy I feel, like someone could step along and crush me underfoot if I'm not careful. And if that happened, I'd wake up.

I'm never scared. Fearless and bold and completely reckless, just because I know that I'm untouchable. Nothing can ever really harm me, because all of this, my life, my family, Robin, even me, none of it is real. Somewhere far away the real Lark is asleep and dreaming of adventure, lost in a world of her own design, and I'm just her avatar, running a mind-maze that just feels like a life until morning comes. There's fear in dreams, sure, there's pain and fighting and going to bed hungry, but I never have to really be scared. All anybody's ever really scared of in the long run is dying, and there is no death in dreams, only waking up to half-darkness with your heart beating fast and the sound of the house creaking around you. I know because I have them sometimes, dreams-within-dreams where I fall and fall and fall only to open my eyes to an endless canvas of stars and my fingers clutching at the shingles tight enough to make my bones creak. Maybe somewhere the real me is so sick and weak that they've put her to sleep forever, so she can dream a life she'll never have, climbing miles beyond a hospital bed from the inside of her own mind.

That's why I do it, why I climb everything I see and laugh so long my ribs ache and sing until my lungs give out smile so much that sometimes people ask what's wrong with me. If I'm going to live, then I'm going to live. My time in this dream-world is only as limited as the hours in the real Lark's sleeping mind, and it would be a crime to spend it being so sad or angry or hopeless like so many of the people I see in my own home. I am happy because I don't have time to be anything else. You only live once, and while I wander the canvas of a sleeping girl's wishes and fears, I want to do it with my mind and heart and eyes wide open. In a sense, death and waking up are the same for me; the only things I'm afraid to lose are the people I have met in this world that isn't real but certainly feels like it.

Maybe I'm such a child because I come from a child's imagination, always more inclined to spontaneous adventure and candy and the sacred rites of being a little kid than I ever am to makeup and responsibility and being a grown-up. From what I know of grown-ups, they're always sad and I have never seen one up in a tree. That's not what I want. I don't match up with others my age, but that's something I've come to accept. Robin's two years younger than me and still seems infinitely older, but we work together like birds of a feather - Robin. Lark. It all works too well to be just coincidence - and I wouldn't have it any other way. Growing up doesn't scare me because nothing scares me, but I have a strong aversion to it. That's why everyone thinks I'm odd, trapped on an endless loop of prepubescence (Robin taught me that word. He has a whole book full of words that he shares with me because I'm the only one who listens) that doesn't match with a body growing into a fate that I never asked for. So I run from it, or rather, I climb. I sit in the highest branches or on top of the highest roof and I hold my childhood close, wondering when one day I won't be able to climb any higher and it will slip away.

Hold on to worry so tight
It's safe in here
Right next to my heart
And I'll shout at the top of my voice
"Let me go, let me out, this is not my choice!"

( H I S T O R Y )

When I was five years old, I fell asleep and never woke up.

I don't remember much before then, only that I had a Mama and a Daddy and a house that wasn't big or small. We weren't rich or poor, and we had a cat named Mittens, and I was always, always climbing. I had a last name that wasn't Keeni, but I don't remember what it was. My name used to be Lara instead of Lark, but I always talked funny when I was little and Persia heard it as Lark when she asked what my name was, and it just stuck. My life before I fell asleep is hazy in that sort of way the first year of kindergarten is, a whirlwind blur of color and sound with only a few distinct memories poking out of the ether. When I was three, I tried ice cream for the first time, and laughed. When I was four, I fell off the table I was climbing and skinned my knee, and cried. When I was five, I got a fever and slipped forever into the world of dreams.

It was the kind of sick that came on without warning and stayed, cold chills and hot flashes and hallucinated displays of technicolor floating in the air over my head. We all had it, Mama and Daddy and me, all three of us so ill that in the end neither of them could even get out of bed to bring me a drink of water no matter how much I cried and cried that I was so thirsty. That's the last thing I remember before I let that colored fog over my sight carry me away, that I was so terribly thirsty my mouth felt like a desert. After that, sleep. Long, dark, dreamless sleep.

I knew I was dreaming when my eyes opened again. The real world could never be so vivid and blurred all at once, the ghosting movement of my own hand in front of my face and the heat beneath my skin all indicators that I was trapped in a fever-dream haze, an alternate version of my house with an alternate me climbing slowly out from underneath the sweat-soaked covers and alternate parents who wouldn't stir no matter how loud I shouted for them. Dreams are the canvas of the impossible, and I wasn't content to sit in the boring replica of my own house and wait to wake up, so I took to the street outside, limbs shaky and head spinning to the point that I could hardly keep myself upright. I stumbled barefoot and clad only in my pyjamas through the endless leg-forests of the streets, determined to find something exciting even though every step made my whole body heavier and it became harder and harder to put one foot in front of the other.

Soon enough, I had reached the point that I could go no further, shuffling into a grimy alley and deeming the dream over. But the traffic in Six was scary for a girl so little, and without even thinking about it my reflex to move up, up and away kicked in and sent me spiraling skywards, dirty, tiny feet digging into the crevices of crumbling walls until I managed to clamber up to the lid of a dumpster, the highest point I could reach before the heat in my head became too much and everything swirled away to blackness again.

When the world swam back into focus, Bear and Persia were standing over me, the former looking at me like I was an interesting but still pretty gross bug he'd found under a rock and the latter looking far more concerned as she petted the sweaty, matted strands of hair back from my face. "What's your name, sweetie?"

Lara, I tried to say, but my mouth was so dry and my throat so swollen that the sound was cut short in a sickly cough of "Lark."

I don't remember the entire chain of events after that, only flashes. Bear and Persia arguing in a hushed, angry exchange of we've got enough mouths to feed already and look at her, she'll die out here and fine, but it'll be your ass Mom's kicking, not mine. The sensation of being scooped up by strong arms and carried through the streets like I didn't weigh a thing (I think that's the moment I realized Bear was the closest thing to a human tree I'd ever find and that was probably the reason I spent the next three years of my life pestering him for piggy back rides). A sunken couch with moth-eaten blankets and Persia tipping a chipped mug of broth up to my lips. The world lost focus again, but this time when I came back from the ether everything was clearer, a worn-down old living room crawling with curious, dirty faces and a pretty, older lady about my mama's age staring at me. "What's this?"

In the far corner, Bear shrugged. "I don't know what it is. We fed it and it stayed."

There wasn't a lot of questions asked after that. Persia told Mama Nina that my name was Lark and I was real sick and then she whispered something about my mama and daddy that I couldn't hear, and then all of a sudden I was Lark Keeni. That's partly the reason I knew I had to be dreaming. When you dream, everything falls into place without you ever having to try, and being drawn into the Keeni family like just another piece in a faded patchwork quilt was as easy as breathing. As soon as I got better, Robin and I fell into stride like gears meshing in a machine, thick as thieves from the get-go. We told each other everything; he shared secrets from his book of words and I tried to teach him how to climb a tree, we invented our own secret language, and one year on my birthday he presented me with a shiny new plastic walkie-talkie whose brother he held in his own hand. I asked him how he'd ever been able to afford it, and he simply smiled like a Cheshire cat. "Want to find out?"

What Robin and I do, it's not wrong. He uses a five-finger-discount, I perch up on a roof and play lookout. He doesn't take anything we don't need, and we don't hurt anyone. It's just that when a family's as big as ours with only Mama Nina to keep food on the table, well, most nights we go to bed with our stomachs growling and a cold shiver in our bones. Me, I know it's a dream, know it's not real, but Robin doesn't see it that way, and I guess that's okay, because honestly sometimes when I hear the little ones cry because they're so hungry, I forget it's not real too. So until the day finally comes when I wake up, I'll keep doing what I do best, clinging to a childhood that everyone wants to take from me and climbing until I can wrap myself in the clouds.

And I've always felt it before
That the world was filled with much more
Than the drowning soul I've learned to be
I just need the rain
To remind me

( C O D E W O R D ) O HAI DAIR

I want to darken in the skies, open the floodgates up
I want to change my mind, I want to be enough
I want the water in my eyes, want to cry until the end of time
I want to let the rain come down, make a brand new ground
Let the rain come down tonight

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

Part of Semper's Keeni Family.

Faceclaim is Sara Bareilles.

Template ripped off from Lalia.

Let The Rain - Sara Bareilles

I want to darken in the skies, open the floodgates up
I want to change my mind, I want to be enough
I want the water in my eyes, want to cry until the end of time
I want to let the rain come down, make a brand new ground
Let the rain come down tonight