glasia granger [eight] {fin.}

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y o u r ★ glass, sia
s o r r o w ★ seventeen
h a s l e f t ★ district eight
t r a c e s ★ female
i n t h e a i r ★ spyglass

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My whole life has consisted of my goodness gracious me, look at that and purpose and procedures and darling, just look and see. Because I was born with problems, issues and defects and produced worried glances between the doctors when my eyes swung back and forth with no direction. The rest of my body grew, but my sight began to deteriorate. The perfect patient. Diagnosed as a mystery from the day I was born, the doctors prodded and poked at me, scanning and testing and triple-checking - all under the watchful eyes of my mother, who had spent her life studying the wonders of Capitol technology and the magic it could bring to imperfect humans from her small little corner in District Eight. "What's wrong with me?" I'd ask when words became clear enough to understand and my mouth could twist around syllables and vowels and make sense of it all - my eyes, however, seemed unable to comprehend the wonders of the world. "Nothing to worry about, my love" she would swoon, caressing the top of my head gently and placing a kiss on my forehead. "Nothing we can't fix."

We did not necessarily entail her and my father, or her and myself. We was always her and the doctors, all robots walking in and out of rooms and hallways with rushed steps and white, fuzzy trench-coats that looked like clouds billowed from their bodies. By this stage, listening was much easier than watching. Heavy weights would hang from my eyelids and force them down, down, down until everything was easier in the dark. Except the bright lights were still there, the colours and the shapes and the flashes of things outside and inside of my head. With eyes open, the world was fuzzy and bright and filled with patches of white noise that blurred with colours that leaked like paint against my irises. Once, I caught a glimpse of my eyes in a mirror on a good day where the world was less confusing to live in and the black had leaked into green and brown and ink seemed to have seeped into the corners of my eyes. The tears, however, rained clear.

My mother grew more and more anxious. With all her savings she bought lens after lens, desperate to fix me, to make me better. (There came a time where it was easier to walk around with my hands outstretched in front of me and my eyelids shut, just to stop the headaches and the pounding overload of information that the darkness prevented.) "Just try this, honey" she would encourage with desperation hidden behind her glassy eyes (or was that just my own trying to tell her that I'd had enough?) "They'll make you better. There. Now, how many fingers am I holding up?"

I'd squint, fighting against the yellow of the office walls that seeped through her hair and the harshness of the glasses that lunged my head forward. "F-four?" I'd guess - or was it three, no - two! No, four! Four was right - wasn't it? (It wasn't.)

At seven, I'd forgotten what fingers looked like.

My mother was at her wits end, and my father had long-passed his. (Still today I think I was the one who sent him away, but if he passed me on the street could I tell who he was? Would he see the glint in my eyes and know that I was cured, but it took everything he opposed to do so?) So then the serious tests began, the ones where I'd have to take off the glasses I was just getting adjusted to and fall asleep for a few hours and awake to darkness. (The first times I screamed, but she was always there to comfort me and whisper nothing but love in my ears.) I screamed because the only thing I wanted more than to make it all turn to darkness was to make my mother proud. In succumbing to what was easy, I would have failed her. I'd shout and beg "Mother, Mother please turn them back on, please make the pain come back" - and it did, eventually. She told me "I know it's hard to understand, my love, but it will make you better, I promise." I did understand though, for I could hear it in her voice, see it in her relentless attempts of trying and trying to make me better. She loved me too much to give up.

On my 10th birthday, they'd found a cure.

"Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me..." I sang as I was led by my mother's hands to the operating tables, blindfolded as to not let any more of my already fragile sight flake away from me. Voices became my new faces, constructing how people looked as they all gathered around and wished me a pleasant day. I don't remember much from those hours, only that they hoped that I would receive everything I wished for. As they left, one by one (footsteps pattering away against a squeaky-clean floor), I felt the light from the outside world seep windows warm my skin, and somehow, I knew I'd be ok. Mother took my hand and asked "Glasia, darling, what do you want more than anything in the world?" And I told her "To get better", not because I knew it was what she wanted to hear, but because I did truly want to stop the pain. (I hid the fact that I'd rather have the darkness than proper sight from her, because I would be oh so terribly awful to waste her work away on my selfish, undisclosed desires.) She kissed my head and told me things would be fine, just as she always did. I was told of special, secret people from the Capitol who were here to make me all better, people who were smarter and cleverer than she was, who were going to show her how to fix me. She promised me that she would never leave my side - and I believed her - but how could I know, really?

They thought I was sleeping (I was ever so good at keeping still and doing as I was told), but I heard their whispers that danced through what I assumed were halls. Obedient, I kept quiet as I listened, never daring to speak up against my mother - or anyone else, for that matter. "She's mine" "She is not yours to test on, Mari" "She is not being tested on! I am fixing her!" "But it's not full-proof, Dr. Granger" "I don't care if it's full-proof, it has to work! She has to work!"

I chose to believe that she wanted me to 'work' because she loved me, and couldn't bare to think of her daughter being hurt any longer. That was before I began to see, before the truth was laid out in front of my and was clear enough to determine, and before I was laid down and felt a familiar hand at my brow and drifted off to sleep on a river of gas and a lullaby I will never forget - the passing words of a doctor that I could have dreamed up sneaking through my memory and planting themselves in my mind.

"Doctor Granger, her eyes..." "hollow, as if they go on forever..." "and - oh my God - she's full of-"

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They told me I had lights inside my eyes. But the lights were not inside me, no - they were around me. They fell through the windows in the ceiling lined with cracks and frayed, peeling paint (I could see all of this, properly, for the first time, and it was magnificent), though the reflections on the hospital floors. Colours - proper colours

[/i] - bounced around me, through the air and in the clouds above my oval-shaped head, a kaleidoscope rainbow of light and liquid. Against my long fingers connected to slim arms and curved hands with lines of wear, tear and future engrained into my palms, light danced against my skin in warm pools, specks of dust (and the shiner, more prominent Dust that skated through the gold morning air) [/i]fell through space and greeted me good morning.

I blinked.

And it was all still there.

"Glasia, darling," my mother cooed, her eyes desperate as she drunk up my responses. "What do you see?"

No hellos, no how am I's, no kisses on my forehead to tell me I was brave. But that didn't matter now, for all I had to do was turn my head the slightest way to see my mother properly for the first time in 10 years. How intricately complicated she was. She had the same shade of watery-brown eyes as me, flicking from her own eyes to mine. (They showed me photos, later on, of what my eyes had looked like.) Once upon a time it had looked as if my irises had exploded, leaking into the corners as they opened up a chasm in the centre of my sight. Except now there was something else in mine, a glimmer around the edges of perfection. She didn't have that. Nobody else did. But I was too focused on the wonder that fell around me, that spread between people and hovered around their heads and swirled in colours I was once so afraid of. Only now did they teach me things, whisper clues and answers into my head I assumed everybody else could see.

"Everything," I crowed. "I see everything."

They took me to a mirror, next. Long brown hair I don't ever remember being cut billowed from my head - the glint still there as I passed my gaze over my reflection. Fingers with too-long nails clawed at my forehead, eyebrows, nose - smooth, textured, bumpy and small - ("Face, skin, hair!" I giggled excitedly) and pain stung at me for a moment before a red shimmer of dust hovered over my fingers in the glass. "Pain" [/i]I whispered to nobody but me.

My mother appeared above my shoulders, her eyes leaving glimpses of my own emotions reflecting back at me - like she couldn't quite believe what she was seeing. [/color]Neither could I. Lines that told tales of hard work and sleepless nights had already started to construct themselves along her brow and in the corners of her eyes. But I wasn't focused on what set us apart, or the similarities on our faces that I was only just discovering.

Your sorrow, I thought, reaching out to form a line in the air around my mother where the dark blue blurs connected, has left traces in the air. [/justify][/color][/justify]

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i could possibly be fading
or have something more to gain
i could feel myself
growing colder
under your fate

m y ★ odair
g o d ★ melissa benoist
i t ' s ★ into dust - mazzy star
f u l l ★ the amber spyglass by phillip pullman & a space odyssey (2001)
o f s t a r s ★ weekend[/color]

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