Post by Deleted on May 12, 2014 23:55:21 GMT -5
PLEASE LET ME KNOW THAT MY ONE BAD DAY WILL END
A N N A C A R D O
DISTRICT10 | THIRTEEN | FEMALE
The house feels disturbingly empty without the boy who took up no space in the first place.
The voices of our family have stopped, the food we received from members of the Districts has run thin, sucked dry from a drought of starvation and hunger. We have been pulled like a rubber band, stretched thin and left to rot. I guess I could thank my Ma and Pa for letting me have my space for a little while, and I guess I could thank them for letting that distance shorten when I came to their room in the middle of the night, tears clinging to my face like I clutched the old and dry teddy bear from my room, for placing a hand on my cheeks and swiping away the tears, suffocating the nightmares with hugs and killing flashbacks with kisses. But my lips do not separate, and my body does not hug them back, and my voice does not escape my mouth with the words Thank you clinging to it's edges.
I am simply just there.
We stretched ourselves thin, too thin for a family who's just lost someone close, each of us sifting through the methods and habits of our lives trying to find our own way to cope with what was going on. Pa watched the Games, twiddling his thumbs and wincing every time a cannon rang out. Ma had taken it upon herself to go through Thistle's possessions, pulling forth memories from when he was a child with each item she found in his room. I watched her clutch this book he used to read all the time, my eyes peeking through their door crack. I expected her to open it, I wanted her to open it and I wanted her to be absorbed in him again, rub her fingers on the pages he once turned and let her eyes drift over words that had once jumped out of the page to him. But she simply sat, hunched over the torn-up book and palm pressed to the surface of the cover, hand shaking slightly like mine does sometimes and hair draping itself across her body.
She was still sitting there when I came back an hour later.
The oldest of my sisters has started leaving the house at mid-noon, her absence only making the house emptier. I don't know where she goes, or what she does when she's gone but this smokey smell's started latching onto her clothes now, and when she comes home her eyes are all bloodshot. She doesn't talk to us, and that's normal , cause no one in our family is talking anymore. But her silence, it just... It just feels worse, in a way. My middle sister has started reading books now too, just like Thistle did all the time. She even took some of the books from his room, and sometimes, when I sit across the room and steal glances at her, I can see tears sprintin' down her face with each page turn, hurdling towards her chin and falling onto the book pages, staining em with sadness.
It's hard to say how i'm coping with this all, with life flipping itself upside down like some circus acrobat and with all the stares and all the apologies. It's funny, y'know, that I can see how everyone else is coping with all this shit and yet I can't see how i'm coping with it myself. I know I sit around a lot, knees to chest and eyes staring straight ahead, locked on some random object in my bedroom. No words, no movements, nothing but my body and my thoughts. And sometimes, when I sat there, i'd close my eyes and just tell myself to breathe, because when emotion tangles your mind and your eyes fill with water and your fingers shake in the slightest yet most noticeable way, simple things like that tend to be put on the back burner.
in, Anna
out, Anna
in, Anna
out, Anna-
Over and over, again and again until I didn't have to remind myself and until the emotions passed like a bad storm. It never fully went away, though. No, the emotions, the memories, the tears, the hugs, they would never settle, they would never stop. But they would hibernate and sleep, yes, that they could do. And they did it well. And, when they took their breaks, i'd move from the spot I sat in and shuffle around my room like my Ma once did back before Thistle left, moving some things, turning them for the sake of turning them until i'd come to the pile of stuffed animals that lay on top of the letter Thistle sent me before he went into the Games and got his neck sliced through.
I still could not bring my fingers to break through the paper and open it.
They dropped Thistle's body off in a box of wood, edges chipped and scratches along the side. They didn't let me go with 'em to pick it up, either, their heads shaking back and forth, mouth closed and my dad's fingers running through my hair, to which I hastily slapped away with as much force as a starving girl from District Ten could manage.
Because i'm tired of it all, of every stare and side glance from everyone in this damned District. I'm tired of the desperate apologies, the empty hugs and the faltering eyes. My body and mind have grown weary of it all, the hugs, the stares, the everything. And I have tried, and failed, to distance myself from them all, to step back and let them run by me, to cut the strings that have tied me to them all my life.
But I do not possess a pair of scissors sharp enough to cut those strings, and in the end, when my attempts to cut the ties have failed and when I am so desperate for it all to stop and for everything and everyone to just go away for just a few minutes, I hide away in my room, slamming the door shut and fingers fumbling with an already half-broken lock before I crawl into the squeaky mattress that is my bed and squeeze my eyes as tight as they will go, my fingers balling up into little tiny fists and there I lay.
But when I close my eyes, I sleep
And when I sleep, I dream
And when I dream, I dream that I am in the Bloodbath
In Laila Sycamore's shoes
And I imagine myself as the one to drive a sword through his neck, to slice his neck clean from his body and watch it hit my shoe and roll away. I imagine the lifeless face that is now rolling around next to his body in a wooden box. I watch myself cut not the strings that are attached to the ones who I love but the strings that attach head to neck, and with each sickening spray of blood my stomach twirls and my hands twitch and my knees knock together.
In the dream, I drop the sword. And I awake from a nightmarish hell screaming as loud as I can, and when my parents burst into the room, I am dragged yet again into the endless game of cutting ties and reattaching them.
Last night, was one of those nights.
Just as every night has been since Thistle's cannon broke our reality, my reality. And as my mother buttons up the hand-me-down dress that I am wearing, holes in the fabric evident all around, I do not look into the mirror, not even when my mother looks up and whispers "Does it look alright?". Instead, I glue them to the ground, nod my head whenever my mother asks a question. Because when I look into the mirror, into a reflection of paper thin bones and chocolate eyes, I see him.
I see him.
I see Thistle, and I see regret, and I see sorrow, and I see grief, and I see Death and despair and sadness and a soul torn away from it's body. All these things, wrapped up into one minuscule reflection and thrown at me, shot at me like a bullet that is bound to kill. And I do not want to die, so I keep them glued to the ground.
Back when we were all kids, Reaping day used to turn our house from a quiet and cramped shack to a noisy, chaotic, and hectic cramped shack in the blink of an eye, everyone rushing to get into their hand-me-down clothes and arrive to the District Square on time. But today it is not like that. The sadness, it hangs in the air, laying it's hand on our shoulders and pushing us through our daily routine. Through getting dressed and ready to leave the house to say goodbye to our own brother, our own son. It guides us, pushes us along. But we are slow today, not because we are lazy and not because we do not want to go but because we are blocked by an impenetrable wall of grief, the knowledge that after this day, when a coffin is lowered into the earth and dirt is thrown on top of it, that we will have to try and let go and move on with our lives. But that is not the only wall that blocks our path. We block our own, and before we leave the house we once again take shelter away from each other, selfishly pulling memories of Thistle from an object that holds them. Ma has that book, my sisters have their objects, my Pa waits in the kitchen for us.
And for me, it is the letter.
I tear paper away from paper, fingers sliding over the bent edges of the once perfectly flat envelope, a dull color cast over it from being left dormant for so long. On the paper is my name, scribbled down in the messy and unreadable handwriting that is- was Thistle's. But I do not critique him on his handwriting. Instead, I sit. I read. I imagine.
"Dear Anna,"
Our feet scuffle on the sidewalk as we make our way to the graveyard.
I know that you are probably wondering why I wrote you your own letter, and I know that the others are probably wondering the same thing too, so tell them sorry if they are offended.
This winter has been unseasonably, unreasonably warm, and sweat trickles down my skin as the heat grasps at me with each passing step.
"When I first got here, I was really confident, that I would win and come home to ya'll. I was almost proud even."
Momma is crying already, fingers brushing away tears only for them to reform again, stuck in an endless cycle.
"But I don't know now Anna. They've got so much skill. I watched this guy from District 2 take out an instructor today. An instructor."
I recall Ares Pine, the boy who's name Thistle did not know. I recall him attacking him in the bloodbath, too, just like everyone else was. His neck was split open just like my brother's, and I remember wishing that he'd had his head severed too.
"But my pride and confidence isn't why I wrote this. Anna, I wrote this, to you only, because I can't stop thinking about how I rejected you when you just needed me to say something. When those peacekeepers were dragging you out and you fought them off and came to me only for me to let you be dragged out again."
The graveyard comes into view, two coffins decorating the land where all the tributes from past Games lay, trapped in wooden boxes for the rest of eternity with dirt laying on top of them. Ma had arranged it with the Villela's that both would be laid to rest at the same time, probably because of money issues.
"I know you wanted me to make that promise Anna, that i'd come home to you. But, as I look around now at all these careers and tributes, it just tells me that that's not a promise to be made. I can't promise that i'll come back to you, Anna. But i'll fight my hardest, i'll try to make it home for you Anna. I have people helping me too, like Mace and Saffron. And i'll try. I'll try."
I hold his letter in my hand, a teardrop resting on the surface of the paper. It is mine from earlier, before we left the house, when my hands trembled and my body shook and tears slipped off my face. I hope that those victors do not show up to this place, where the minuscule group of dark-dressed people stood around, staring at coffins that held the bodies of District Ten's most precious tributes yet.
"I'll try Anna. But I can't make any promises.
I'm sorry.
- Thistle"
I slip the letter into the pocket on my dress as we come to the coffins, my eyes scanning over the coffin that holds Thistles body, his headless body. It is chipped and dented, a showing of just how tight our money is. The Villela's is more pristine, cleaner, sharper, and it is open, the girl's face still, lifeless, peaceful if not for the fact that her body had been racked with poison in the end. They had neglected her, all of them. They had money, they could have saved her. They could have saved her.
But they did not, and as I stand in front of his coffin, fingers resting on the dented wood, my stomach boils with an anger unlike anything else I have ever felt before. Anger at them, anger at everyone, anger at everyone. At Thistle, at Saffron, at Mace and myself and Ma and Pa and everyone in this district.
My hand shakes and I become a bubble of hatred and grief.
It will only take one prick.
_______________________________________________________
A N N A C A R D O
DISTRICT10 | THIRTEEN | FEMALE
_______________________________________________________
The house feels disturbingly empty without the boy who took up no space in the first place.
The voices of our family have stopped, the food we received from members of the Districts has run thin, sucked dry from a drought of starvation and hunger. We have been pulled like a rubber band, stretched thin and left to rot. I guess I could thank my Ma and Pa for letting me have my space for a little while, and I guess I could thank them for letting that distance shorten when I came to their room in the middle of the night, tears clinging to my face like I clutched the old and dry teddy bear from my room, for placing a hand on my cheeks and swiping away the tears, suffocating the nightmares with hugs and killing flashbacks with kisses. But my lips do not separate, and my body does not hug them back, and my voice does not escape my mouth with the words Thank you clinging to it's edges.
I am simply just there.
We stretched ourselves thin, too thin for a family who's just lost someone close, each of us sifting through the methods and habits of our lives trying to find our own way to cope with what was going on. Pa watched the Games, twiddling his thumbs and wincing every time a cannon rang out. Ma had taken it upon herself to go through Thistle's possessions, pulling forth memories from when he was a child with each item she found in his room. I watched her clutch this book he used to read all the time, my eyes peeking through their door crack. I expected her to open it, I wanted her to open it and I wanted her to be absorbed in him again, rub her fingers on the pages he once turned and let her eyes drift over words that had once jumped out of the page to him. But she simply sat, hunched over the torn-up book and palm pressed to the surface of the cover, hand shaking slightly like mine does sometimes and hair draping itself across her body.
She was still sitting there when I came back an hour later.
The oldest of my sisters has started leaving the house at mid-noon, her absence only making the house emptier. I don't know where she goes, or what she does when she's gone but this smokey smell's started latching onto her clothes now, and when she comes home her eyes are all bloodshot. She doesn't talk to us, and that's normal , cause no one in our family is talking anymore. But her silence, it just... It just feels worse, in a way. My middle sister has started reading books now too, just like Thistle did all the time. She even took some of the books from his room, and sometimes, when I sit across the room and steal glances at her, I can see tears sprintin' down her face with each page turn, hurdling towards her chin and falling onto the book pages, staining em with sadness.
It's hard to say how i'm coping with this all, with life flipping itself upside down like some circus acrobat and with all the stares and all the apologies. It's funny, y'know, that I can see how everyone else is coping with all this shit and yet I can't see how i'm coping with it myself. I know I sit around a lot, knees to chest and eyes staring straight ahead, locked on some random object in my bedroom. No words, no movements, nothing but my body and my thoughts. And sometimes, when I sat there, i'd close my eyes and just tell myself to breathe, because when emotion tangles your mind and your eyes fill with water and your fingers shake in the slightest yet most noticeable way, simple things like that tend to be put on the back burner.
in, Anna
out, Anna
in, Anna
out, Anna-
Over and over, again and again until I didn't have to remind myself and until the emotions passed like a bad storm. It never fully went away, though. No, the emotions, the memories, the tears, the hugs, they would never settle, they would never stop. But they would hibernate and sleep, yes, that they could do. And they did it well. And, when they took their breaks, i'd move from the spot I sat in and shuffle around my room like my Ma once did back before Thistle left, moving some things, turning them for the sake of turning them until i'd come to the pile of stuffed animals that lay on top of the letter Thistle sent me before he went into the Games and got his neck sliced through.
I still could not bring my fingers to break through the paper and open it.
They dropped Thistle's body off in a box of wood, edges chipped and scratches along the side. They didn't let me go with 'em to pick it up, either, their heads shaking back and forth, mouth closed and my dad's fingers running through my hair, to which I hastily slapped away with as much force as a starving girl from District Ten could manage.
Because i'm tired of it all, of every stare and side glance from everyone in this damned District. I'm tired of the desperate apologies, the empty hugs and the faltering eyes. My body and mind have grown weary of it all, the hugs, the stares, the everything. And I have tried, and failed, to distance myself from them all, to step back and let them run by me, to cut the strings that have tied me to them all my life.
But I do not possess a pair of scissors sharp enough to cut those strings, and in the end, when my attempts to cut the ties have failed and when I am so desperate for it all to stop and for everything and everyone to just go away for just a few minutes, I hide away in my room, slamming the door shut and fingers fumbling with an already half-broken lock before I crawl into the squeaky mattress that is my bed and squeeze my eyes as tight as they will go, my fingers balling up into little tiny fists and there I lay.
But when I close my eyes, I sleep
And when I sleep, I dream
And when I dream, I dream that I am in the Bloodbath
In Laila Sycamore's shoes
And I imagine myself as the one to drive a sword through his neck, to slice his neck clean from his body and watch it hit my shoe and roll away. I imagine the lifeless face that is now rolling around next to his body in a wooden box. I watch myself cut not the strings that are attached to the ones who I love but the strings that attach head to neck, and with each sickening spray of blood my stomach twirls and my hands twitch and my knees knock together.
In the dream, I drop the sword. And I awake from a nightmarish hell screaming as loud as I can, and when my parents burst into the room, I am dragged yet again into the endless game of cutting ties and reattaching them.
Last night, was one of those nights.
Just as every night has been since Thistle's cannon broke our reality, my reality. And as my mother buttons up the hand-me-down dress that I am wearing, holes in the fabric evident all around, I do not look into the mirror, not even when my mother looks up and whispers "Does it look alright?". Instead, I glue them to the ground, nod my head whenever my mother asks a question. Because when I look into the mirror, into a reflection of paper thin bones and chocolate eyes, I see him.
I see him.
I see Thistle, and I see regret, and I see sorrow, and I see grief, and I see Death and despair and sadness and a soul torn away from it's body. All these things, wrapped up into one minuscule reflection and thrown at me, shot at me like a bullet that is bound to kill. And I do not want to die, so I keep them glued to the ground.
Back when we were all kids, Reaping day used to turn our house from a quiet and cramped shack to a noisy, chaotic, and hectic cramped shack in the blink of an eye, everyone rushing to get into their hand-me-down clothes and arrive to the District Square on time. But today it is not like that. The sadness, it hangs in the air, laying it's hand on our shoulders and pushing us through our daily routine. Through getting dressed and ready to leave the house to say goodbye to our own brother, our own son. It guides us, pushes us along. But we are slow today, not because we are lazy and not because we do not want to go but because we are blocked by an impenetrable wall of grief, the knowledge that after this day, when a coffin is lowered into the earth and dirt is thrown on top of it, that we will have to try and let go and move on with our lives. But that is not the only wall that blocks our path. We block our own, and before we leave the house we once again take shelter away from each other, selfishly pulling memories of Thistle from an object that holds them. Ma has that book, my sisters have their objects, my Pa waits in the kitchen for us.
And for me, it is the letter.
I tear paper away from paper, fingers sliding over the bent edges of the once perfectly flat envelope, a dull color cast over it from being left dormant for so long. On the paper is my name, scribbled down in the messy and unreadable handwriting that is- was Thistle's. But I do not critique him on his handwriting. Instead, I sit. I read. I imagine.
"Dear Anna,"
Our feet scuffle on the sidewalk as we make our way to the graveyard.
I know that you are probably wondering why I wrote you your own letter, and I know that the others are probably wondering the same thing too, so tell them sorry if they are offended.
This winter has been unseasonably, unreasonably warm, and sweat trickles down my skin as the heat grasps at me with each passing step.
"When I first got here, I was really confident, that I would win and come home to ya'll. I was almost proud even."
Momma is crying already, fingers brushing away tears only for them to reform again, stuck in an endless cycle.
"But I don't know now Anna. They've got so much skill. I watched this guy from District 2 take out an instructor today. An instructor."
I recall Ares Pine, the boy who's name Thistle did not know. I recall him attacking him in the bloodbath, too, just like everyone else was. His neck was split open just like my brother's, and I remember wishing that he'd had his head severed too.
"But my pride and confidence isn't why I wrote this. Anna, I wrote this, to you only, because I can't stop thinking about how I rejected you when you just needed me to say something. When those peacekeepers were dragging you out and you fought them off and came to me only for me to let you be dragged out again."
The graveyard comes into view, two coffins decorating the land where all the tributes from past Games lay, trapped in wooden boxes for the rest of eternity with dirt laying on top of them. Ma had arranged it with the Villela's that both would be laid to rest at the same time, probably because of money issues.
"I know you wanted me to make that promise Anna, that i'd come home to you. But, as I look around now at all these careers and tributes, it just tells me that that's not a promise to be made. I can't promise that i'll come back to you, Anna. But i'll fight my hardest, i'll try to make it home for you Anna. I have people helping me too, like Mace and Saffron. And i'll try. I'll try."
I hold his letter in my hand, a teardrop resting on the surface of the paper. It is mine from earlier, before we left the house, when my hands trembled and my body shook and tears slipped off my face. I hope that those victors do not show up to this place, where the minuscule group of dark-dressed people stood around, staring at coffins that held the bodies of District Ten's most precious tributes yet.
"I'll try Anna. But I can't make any promises.
I'm sorry.
- Thistle"
I slip the letter into the pocket on my dress as we come to the coffins, my eyes scanning over the coffin that holds Thistles body, his headless body. It is chipped and dented, a showing of just how tight our money is. The Villela's is more pristine, cleaner, sharper, and it is open, the girl's face still, lifeless, peaceful if not for the fact that her body had been racked with poison in the end. They had neglected her, all of them. They had money, they could have saved her. They could have saved her.
But they did not, and as I stand in front of his coffin, fingers resting on the dented wood, my stomach boils with an anger unlike anything else I have ever felt before. Anger at them, anger at everyone, anger at everyone. At Thistle, at Saffron, at Mace and myself and Ma and Pa and everyone in this district.
My hand shakes and I become a bubble of hatred and grief.
It will only take one prick.
_______________________________________________________
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