i wait for words {dars}

To Peter, Susan, Edmu

To the Pever

Dear Mr. Pe

Hello Lucy's fami




I'm sorry.

She's always hated writing. School never came easy for her, all that sitting still and paying attention and behaving. No, she'd much rather run around the yards and swing on tires than sit behind a desk with a pencil in her hand. (What she'd give to go back in time all those years ago, to steal that little girl away from that place, to tell that untouched soul to savour her days before the end begins.) But that longing to be and do and run about and jump around and get her dress dirty made her who she was, sculpted her into a fighter, carried her through the arena and into her new forever. Every part of her past happened for a reason, and perhaps if she'd sat behind her desk like a good little girl and learned to write with both hands and memorized facts and figures instead of kicking up dirt in the playground and stealing coins from backpacks she wouldn't be sitting here breathing. Perhaps she would have shied away from a battle, perhaps she would have laid in the snow to die, perhaps she would have let Ewe Saw finish her off in the middle of the maze. (She inhales. It hurts. She exhales. That hurts even more.) Living hurts. Life is tough. Dying is easy. Death is simple. If she were to give up then she would have been a coward. And to give up now makes all 23 of them seem worthless, insignificant, a joke to bite down on in a classroom. She is the rust in the screws of her chair, dust that stung her eyes, and dirt gritted down to her very core.

But most importantly, she is brave. So she'll try, for them. God knows she'll try.

Her left hand is shaky and inconsistent, learning to form letters all over again. Her right hand has feeling and the Capitol did what they could to patch up the parts of her that she left behind in the arena, but it's not the same as a real hand and it's slow and frustrating - writing is near impossible. She'd promised her new best friend that she'd teach him to write, to learn again with him. (His silhouette dances in her dreams in a new flood of tears. Only now does she wonder if the floods that chased her to Ewe's death were the tides she would soon choke on over his brother, the tides they both swam through in their youth, a reminder that she cannot escape the arena no matter how many years go by.) She hears his laughter through the Capitol halls and it haunts her to this very day.

She tries their names again: Lucy, Ivana, Cerise. Thistle, Aurora, Eye. There is so much she wants to say that seems almost unfathomable to put into words. Letter by shaky letter, their names form across her eyes until the floods return and she hastily sweeps them away, abandoning the pencil on the desk once more. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thinks with a fury that could light the page on fire. (She wishes it would consume her instead.)

The floods arrive once more, followed by tremors that tore the redwood forest down and cries of pain from all the souls within her. A calamity of curses fall from her tongue ("Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck" she mutters, a vocabulary so far from what she once knew now stuck on repeat) - because she hates this with all of her heart. It is worse than the night terrors that shake her into her nightmare reality, worse than falling back into the arena when the room is filled with a hundred people and yet nobody is paying attention, worse than drowning under a sea of Capitolites pulling at her patience. It is what she keeps buried underneath silence, stares and smiles. Weakness claws at her everywhere - today in a simple task rendered impossible. You cannot rule without strength. You cannot be brave without power. It is her job to hide it, to conceal it, to overcome it. For them. For all of them.

Someday she'll write them all letters. Someday. But part of being brave is asking for help - a courage that took a long time for her to grasp hold of. 



She smiles the next day as Calder enters the room.

Be brave, be brave, be brave.

(They remind her, every single day.)