Paradigm Ozona \\ District Seven

You took me to your favorite place on Earth

to see the tree they cut down 

ten years from your birth

Seventeen.
Female.
District Seven.

Paper. She swipes her hand across the pages with delicate fingers, soft skin expertly tracing over words and sentences and paragraphs that form stories deeply ingrained in her own mind, stories of heroines - never heroes - saving the day and kicking villains to the side in their so-what-who-cares impractical high-heeled boots.

In her own mind, she rules above all.

She does not hide in stories, but creates herself from them, learning how to wield words like a knife and hold her head high like the best of them, increasing her distance from the ground just by looking at the clouds above. As if that distance were not already abnormal for a girl who stands at nearly six feet even, the trees let her climb even higher, just high enough where she might dangle her legs from a tall branch, balancing a hundred feet in the air as she turns to the next page.

The heights frighten her, but she tackles them anyway.

Because she has to, she tells herself. She must move forward, must keep fighting, must remain strong. Those bright green eyes don't have time to become dull, not with a family of seven relying on her extra income from the paper mill, creating the same pages that likely go on to create her beloved stories.

But she doesn't mind; she loves the smell of paper. Even in school, she scribbles away in the tiniest type of handwriting, cramming her imperceptible notes onto stolen pages as if writing on sheets of gold. Only her intelligence requires few notes, and classes leave her bored and daydreaming about faraway places and the person she might be in another universe.

In her mind, she is powerful, heroic, unstoppable.

But only in her mind.