Flicker :: [Calliope + Wolfy // 68th Bloodbath Reaction]
Oct 5, 2014 20:51:10 GMT -5
Post by L△LIA on Oct 5, 2014 20:51:10 GMT -5
After all these years, some ghosts continue to haunt me more than others. There are so many things other people have forgotten: The architecture of Aesop's face, the shameless desperation of love that nagged his audience with reminders of a monster's humanity, the perpetual motion of his triumphs and failures, the memory of his death and how dying is supposed to mean something, but didn't when it came to him.
I know. I know that he doesn't mean much to anyone but me anymore and there are terrible nights when I lay awake, sobbing and clutching at my useless chest, wishing I could forget too. It's exhausting to still feel the emptiness my brother left in my life so acutely. Time is supposed to make things easier, but maybe time is broken for me or maybe I'm just broken. There's guilt afterward and, if nothing else, I hope that his ghost is the one that can't find me. He can't know that these thoughts massacre me in the dark or see what I've become. It's not good, it's not right, I know this. IknowIknowIfuckingknowalright.
People don't really talk about Aesop Bloom anymore unless the television tells them to and even then it's only for a moment, as they hastily bury his memory back into the more forgotten places of collective consciousness. Other Tributes from our District have come and gone and there's no need to dwell on our less-shining moments. Honestly, I don't mind the way everyone lets his name slip off them like unwanted rain. I used to, but not anymore. It's selfish. For my own part, I've almost slipped back into anonymity and there are flickers of sanity here. Life has been a little warmer. I smile sometimes, against my will usually, but if anything that's better than forcing the corners of my lips up. I find myself wondering if there is a new ghost that has come for me, raised up from a lifetime ago. There are fleeting moments — mere milliseconds — where I remember what it felt like to not be passionately unhappy all the time.
It's a kind of calm. Simple. Clean. Uneventful. Borderline bliss.
I'm hiding out in the waiting room of Poe's hospital ward when it happens, sipping coffee as an excuse to avoid looking at my surviving brother's comatose face. That sounds bad and it's not that it's not because society would tell you it's terrible of me to procrastinate on visiting him. Society sucks and doesn't know shit. In reality, for me this is progress. My visits to Poe are usually made in almost gleeful spite, lording over him that no matter how rotten I am, I'm still better than him, because I come and sit with him even thought I hate him. I do the right thing because I am a human being and he's worse than dog shit. My avoiding him is actually a silent confession that I don't feel like being cruel today.
If I walked into his room now, I think I could sit down and not curse at him or hit him or yell nonsense or seethe with untameable hatred. I think I could just sit there and exist in the same place with him for a while and then get up and leave. Just like that. All that nothing would mean so much.
The nurse at the reception desk has the television turned up nice and loud, still tuned in even though the required viewing of the Bloodbath of the Sixty-Eighth Annual Hunger Games is technically over. I watched like everyone else and when I puked into the dinky little wastebasket they keep by the coffee machine for disposing of the paper cups, nobody even gave me the side eye. Someone patted my back and murmured something I couldn't understand and I didn't shrug the touch away because I was heaving and heaving and heaving and —
Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodnotagain. You can't have her like you took Aesop and Ethan. Please, no. She's mine. She's —
Galaxy doesn't die and I think maybe there is a single atom existing within this universe that is still beautiful. It's funny — although I honestly don't know if it's funny-haha or funny-strange or both, maybe both — being forced to admit that I still know how to care about someone. My face has gotten into the habit of looking like it is made out of pure stone and annoyance, but today it is all flesh and itchy red cheeks from crying too much. I didn't even bother to look around and see if anyone I knew was watchingbecause if he was I might have to admit to caring again, alternating my eyes between that awful screen and the splattered contents of the trash bin I had claimed as my very own.
Fuck television.
I'm allowed to think the awfulness has slipped into a lull just long enough to start washing away the sour taste of my upturned stomach, finding a few small sips of comfort by sating my caffeine addiction. My new sense of calm scampers back to me with both hesitance and the shyest kind of warmth and I settle. This is what breathing feels like and it's a little bit lovely.
The screen flickers with an old ghost as a camera catches on the name carved into Barnabas Stroud's bone sword — Ethan Taurus — and suddenly I am surrounded by an army of ugly, feverish things risen from the dead. It's a name that jolts through me before I even make the bigger connection, before anyone here in this room or District or whole damn country does, and the whispers haven't started yet. There's just ironically dead silence as the too familiar name of our community's infamous Quell Cannibal catches in our collective throat, although mine is the only one stuttered by sadness. He was the first Tribute I visited after Aesop, swearing to myself that I would be better than everyone else, that I would remember his name and never curse it no matter what. I didn't know what I was setting myself up forcannibal cannibal cannibal, but I don't regret it and I still refuse to lash my tongue at him. Who knows what he would have been to me if he'd have made it back instead of being torn limb-from-limb in the Bloodbath —
Limb. From. Limb. It creeps into us like slow motion terror. That sword is carved from Ethan's limb. Oh fuck oh shit oh goddamn it all to hell! That sword is carved from Ethan's limb. The hand that had been quietly resting against my back flinches away as the first whisper of Bloom haunts the air, memories of Aesop swinging Cassandra Hearsh's severed leg around as a weapon resurfacing in all of our minds. There are small echoes of stifled screams and a few squeaks of shoes against tile as one cowardly soul makes a break for it and flees from my terrible radius.
"That's Calliope Bloom," someone whispers.
"Crazy," mutters another, the word slipped in between others that I can't even hear over my hatred of that word. My heart screams. "Crazy."
"Not again," each and every one says or thinks to themselves or to whatever God or television they put their faith in.
This is the one thing everyone remembers about Aesop Bloom. Years ago he lived and loved and was wonderful and died and should have still been wonderful, but he attacked a girl with her own limb, swung it again during a hallucinogen-fueled fight, and carried the literal weight of that guilt with him to the end and so nothing else matters. This one flickering ghost of memory is determined to haunt not only me, but everyone.
Endlessly.
I know. I know that he doesn't mean much to anyone but me anymore and there are terrible nights when I lay awake, sobbing and clutching at my useless chest, wishing I could forget too. It's exhausting to still feel the emptiness my brother left in my life so acutely. Time is supposed to make things easier, but maybe time is broken for me or maybe I'm just broken. There's guilt afterward and, if nothing else, I hope that his ghost is the one that can't find me. He can't know that these thoughts massacre me in the dark or see what I've become. It's not good, it's not right, I know this. IknowIknowIfuckingknowalright.
People don't really talk about Aesop Bloom anymore unless the television tells them to and even then it's only for a moment, as they hastily bury his memory back into the more forgotten places of collective consciousness. Other Tributes from our District have come and gone and there's no need to dwell on our less-shining moments. Honestly, I don't mind the way everyone lets his name slip off them like unwanted rain. I used to, but not anymore. It's selfish. For my own part, I've almost slipped back into anonymity and there are flickers of sanity here. Life has been a little warmer. I smile sometimes, against my will usually, but if anything that's better than forcing the corners of my lips up. I find myself wondering if there is a new ghost that has come for me, raised up from a lifetime ago. There are fleeting moments — mere milliseconds — where I remember what it felt like to not be passionately unhappy all the time.
It's a kind of calm. Simple. Clean. Uneventful. Borderline bliss.
I'm hiding out in the waiting room of Poe's hospital ward when it happens, sipping coffee as an excuse to avoid looking at my surviving brother's comatose face. That sounds bad and it's not that it's not because society would tell you it's terrible of me to procrastinate on visiting him. Society sucks and doesn't know shit. In reality, for me this is progress. My visits to Poe are usually made in almost gleeful spite, lording over him that no matter how rotten I am, I'm still better than him, because I come and sit with him even thought I hate him. I do the right thing because I am a human being and he's worse than dog shit. My avoiding him is actually a silent confession that I don't feel like being cruel today.
If I walked into his room now, I think I could sit down and not curse at him or hit him or yell nonsense or seethe with untameable hatred. I think I could just sit there and exist in the same place with him for a while and then get up and leave. Just like that. All that nothing would mean so much.
The nurse at the reception desk has the television turned up nice and loud, still tuned in even though the required viewing of the Bloodbath of the Sixty-Eighth Annual Hunger Games is technically over. I watched like everyone else and when I puked into the dinky little wastebasket they keep by the coffee machine for disposing of the paper cups, nobody even gave me the side eye. Someone patted my back and murmured something I couldn't understand and I didn't shrug the touch away because I was heaving and heaving and heaving and —
Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodnotagain. You can't have her like you took Aesop and Ethan. Please, no. She's mine. She's —
Galaxy doesn't die and I think maybe there is a single atom existing within this universe that is still beautiful. It's funny — although I honestly don't know if it's funny-haha or funny-strange or both, maybe both — being forced to admit that I still know how to care about someone. My face has gotten into the habit of looking like it is made out of pure stone and annoyance, but today it is all flesh and itchy red cheeks from crying too much. I didn't even bother to look around and see if anyone I knew was watching
Fuck television.
I'm allowed to think the awfulness has slipped into a lull just long enough to start washing away the sour taste of my upturned stomach, finding a few small sips of comfort by sating my caffeine addiction. My new sense of calm scampers back to me with both hesitance and the shyest kind of warmth and I settle. This is what breathing feels like and it's a little bit lovely.
The screen flickers with an old ghost as a camera catches on the name carved into Barnabas Stroud's bone sword — Ethan Taurus — and suddenly I am surrounded by an army of ugly, feverish things risen from the dead. It's a name that jolts through me before I even make the bigger connection, before anyone here in this room or District or whole damn country does, and the whispers haven't started yet. There's just ironically dead silence as the too familiar name of our community's infamous Quell Cannibal catches in our collective throat, although mine is the only one stuttered by sadness. He was the first Tribute I visited after Aesop, swearing to myself that I would be better than everyone else, that I would remember his name and never curse it no matter what. I didn't know what I was setting myself up for
Limb. From. Limb. It creeps into us like slow motion terror. That sword is carved from Ethan's limb. Oh fuck oh shit oh goddamn it all to hell! That sword is carved from Ethan's limb. The hand that had been quietly resting against my back flinches away as the first whisper of Bloom haunts the air, memories of Aesop swinging Cassandra Hearsh's severed leg around as a weapon resurfacing in all of our minds. There are small echoes of stifled screams and a few squeaks of shoes against tile as one cowardly soul makes a break for it and flees from my terrible radius.
"That's Calliope Bloom," someone whispers.
"Crazy," mutters another, the word slipped in between others that I can't even hear over my hatred of that word. My heart screams. "Crazy."
"Not again," each and every one says or thinks to themselves or to whatever God or television they put their faith in.
This is the one thing everyone remembers about Aesop Bloom. Years ago he lived and loved and was wonderful and died and should have still been wonderful, but he attacked a girl with her own limb, swung it again during a hallucinogen-fueled fight, and carried the literal weight of that guilt with him to the end and so nothing else matters. This one flickering ghost of memory is determined to haunt not only me, but everyone.
Endlessly.
