a place to call {home} // clover

The album of faded photographs is heavy, as though a captured lifetime bares it's own weight. I've seen every single picture inside countless times, and yet there is a certain magic to holding the journal on my lap, curled in the armchair and breathing in the dusty, worn scent it carries. Each time I lift a weary hand to turn the page I am greeted with the grinning faces of my past - even more enthralling, there are snapshots from times before I remember. My favourite is slightly blurry polaroid featuring a beaming six-year-old Kronos standing in the forest. It's a family picnic - the checkered rug is beside him, and if you look closely in the top left-hand corner, you can just about make out Eponymous crouched in the branches with some kind of contraption strapped to his back.

Bathing in the neverending sunlight below, Amarath, just four, clutches a picture story book and tugs at the sleeve of our father, who's distracted by Atreyu - babbling away, captured right in the middle of a brilliant tale nobody can recall now. Wrapped in my father's spare arm is my beaming mother, looking tired and yet still so happy, as though nothing could possibly go wrong. I'm in the picture, too, of course. Only just two years old, not yet strong enough to walk. They tell me I was recovering from a particularly bad bout of sickness at the time, but I always am. I am the only one in the picture not smiling. And yet there we all are, our skin shining with the glow of the morning, the picnic basket as yet untouched and the storybook unread. I still can't work out who took the photograph - perhaps it was on timer - but to me, our family seems painfully complete.

I turn the yellowing page to find the only image of myself where I am smiling. I'm six years old, sitting at the dinner table with my legs dangling down and coming nowhere close to the floor - in front of me sits a mug of something warm (the steam is visible even though the edges of the paper are a little torn and the shine has worn away) and a book. A gap-toothed set of glossy white teeth are flashed toward the camera, and my eyes are closed. I remember that day - Mama brought me back the book and asked me to read it for her, and, feeling oddly amicable, I did as I was asked on the condition I could go out and play afterward. I'd had a good summer - probably my best - even making it to school for a couple of days a week after the break. As the camera whirred and the flash lit the room, I had completed the final chapter and was to be allowed out. (It was a good five minutes before she dragged me right back in, I recall, but they were a brilliant five.)

With a sigh I close the volume and put an end to the history lesson I have lived a thousand times over. Not for the first time today, I turn my attention to the window and gaze at the muddy puddles that scatter the ground. A bird flies past, unknowingly more free than any of us will ever be. (The confines of the District frustrate me almost as much as the confines of my house, or my own fragile body.) It is only then that I notice a figure, slight and somewhat familiar, running as though she's trapped in a nightmare. I assumed, always, that people who were able to run felt free - after all, I would give almost anything just to have legs that would carry me indefinitely, far, far away - but to me, she looks anything but free. I throw open the window before she can disappear. "Hello?" I call out to her. "What are you running from?"

I wonder if I'd like to be running from it, too.