rowan combe {d7} finished

In my dreams, I'm beautiful.

Woven with golden segments and happy memories and the most deepest desires of my heart, my mind forms worlds I wish with all my might I could live in instead of this one. Here, there is no slaughter of innocents. Here, only the evil are punished for their crimes. Laughter and cheers fall across the sky, and I wave back - elegant, poised, a smile beaming back and them with straight teeth out of picture-perfect Capitol photographs. Dressed in fabrics only Victors could dream of, they call for me, their praise whispering across the night sky. Look at her, they call, isn't she marvellous? So kind, so beautiful, so selfless. Things only dreams could be made of.

Heartbreaking it is, however, that only the darkest of dreams can come to light.

Because I wake up, and I am not beautiful, or elegant, or poised. I am plain, gangly and accident-prone, with purple blotches against my skin to attest for. There are no crowds cheering for me, my altruistic actions, my good deeds and my striking features, because there is nothing striking about me at all. Not my eyes, with their ordinary shade of blue that a thousand people own. Not my hair, a faded brown that does not shine or bounce in a certain way or fall around my face ever-so perfectly. I have received, in my opinion, the worst parts of my parents. My mother was beautiful, and as for my father I do not know. In my head, I like to think he's handsome. Though that would not take into account my features at all. There is an air of awkwardness around me that hasn't seem to let its clutches loose ever since I hit the years of growing and change, and how I wish I could trade it in for an aura of gracefulness and effortless movement. My head seemed to adjust to the changes, but my balance, however, failed on it's part.

Maybe if I close my eyes, one day I'll wake to what I've always dreamed to be. Beautiful.

in a dream
i was a werewolf
my soul was filled with crystal light
lavender ribbons of rain sang
ridding my heart of mortal fight

I don't like to admit this, but sometimes the dreams turn sour. Other times, the bleed into reality, but if I ever let that slip from my tongue they'd call me crazy and nobody would ever speak to me again. I can't have that, I simply can't. I live off others, thirst for their praise, their laughter, their touch. I need them here to keep me grounded. To remind me that they are real. At night, the princess arises from the land of the conscious and the happy and treads barefoot across the forest floor, cold against her toes. Her shoes have vanished from her feet, for no heel could tackle the uneven dirt underneath her soles as she tiptoes against the edges of shadows and searches the darkness for something. What that something is, I don't know. She's dressed in red and I want to cry out to her, warn her - he'll find you, Red, it's his favourite colour - but I can't scream. I can't even breathe.

Because that princess is me.

You should make no sound in the forest. That's the golden rule. Because he has such big ears, he does, and he'll here you - me - coming from a mile away. He has such big teeth, he does, and he'll snatch me up in his malicious jaw before I can blink him away. He has such long claws, he does, that perhaps he'll hoist me away from safety before I can climb high enough from the ground. His eyes, however, they linger for the longest of times. In my dreams I was only going to Granny's, just to see her, that was all. Just a hop, skip and a jump up the concrete pathways to her home - it wasn't her home exactly, but I knew in my heart that somehow it was. Dreams have an odd way of getting even deeper inside of your head than they already are. So I pattered up there in my naive ways and slid through the door expecting warmth, but all there was was more overgrown forests from my storybooks and around my home in the real world - and the eerie sensation that someone was always watching me. Fear builds up in me so quickly, forces my limbs to paralyse themselves with shock. So I ran through the forest and the trees and the vines that hung just above my head, lost in translation and fighting for direction. 

Because that's the princesses job. To run away from mutts and evil wolves and scary Careers that hold glistening knives above you and strangle you with their sickly, sinister laughter as reality morphs with imagination and becomes, in sleep and time, my ultimate downfall.

oceanward and somber, slumber sleeping
flowers in the water, but i'm just his daughter
walking down an icy grave leading to my father
weeping willow won't you wallow louder?
searching for my father's power

Come back to reality and the horrors are still here.

I tiptoe through the dense forests around the only place I've ever called home, and everything seems so familiar. I've dreamt of this place before - but there's no fresh morning air to breathe in or birds to greet me with their soft calls when I'm sleeping, no sunlight streaming through the leaves above me that lets me know I'm safe, that there are no ghosts to plague me in the morning when I rise. I awoke in the dead of the night with a blood-chilling scream and refused to go back to sleep. Grandma sat with me and dried my eyes, whispered soft words to match her kind gaze. "Hush now child, you're safe and sound with me." 

And I am, for most of the year. For she is all I have left, my mother dead and my father left to my imagination, and how could I stumble so carelessly into danger and leave her all alone? I stay out of trouble, roaming the forests where I should and never daring to step even a toe over anything that looks to me like a boundary. They'll cut your tongue out for speaking out of turn, so only Ripred knows what they'd do for stepping out of it. They are too precious. I need my feet to run from the monsters in my dreams. But what foolish girl would dare to scream that aloud to a heartless Peacekeeper?

Not me. Never me.

You hear stories that keep you up at night about children stolen in the dead of the night and see them on television as their lives are snatched by another in the hopeless, desperate promise of living another day if you take another's life. My versions plunge me into insomnia and leave dark traces underneath my eyes. You watch whippings in your District Square and walk past workers crushed underneath the trunks of trees that screamed to be left alone. In the end, they fought with every last breath and got the justice they deserved. But the Capitol people and the Peacekeepers just pick them up and dust them off, hide them under the carpet and pretend like nothing happened. It's like the Hunger Games every day of the year, with fate as a Gamemaker picking and choosing his victims as he pleases. The worst part of it is that nobody seems to really care. Only the families mourn their losses and others just sigh and move on, because it's what happens. People die. This is real life, this is Panem, and that is the truth of it all.

When you ask most children around here what they want to be when they grow up, they don't say a princess. They want to be alive. 

I started to understand that the day I turned 12.

loose grip on gravity falls
sky blinding crumbling walls
river sweeps away my memories
of children's things, a young mother's love
young hearts burst open, wounds bleed fresh