St. Jude [closed]

If we’re to become anything, I hope that it’s with promise. Freya and I have talked so much about the future that I can feel it climbing up my back and nipping at my neck, same as the stars when the sun sets—ready to be drawn around me, and to make me still. I want to believe that we’re meant to be something because for each other, we’ve come too far to fall away. And still we’re like sand on the beach, tumbling down every day that the waves come in. How many times can we build up again, make castles with sea shell windows before—before the sand comes out from underneath, and all that’s left is a set of rocks? I think about all the mistakes that got me here, and how many more that I’ve yet to make. The same ones that could spell the end of each of us, only because we’re too afraid, too naïve, too far from what we were supposed to be for either of us to become. It chills me to the bone because I know, I know that I want to be with her, I can’t live without her, but what makes me a man has been enough to break the two of us apart a million times over.

The city streets are empty in the evening during the games—these streets, the ones that lead to the stalls in alleyways, and little bars that have no names because, the clientele would rather not to be known. It’s here that the avoxes sneak, one of the few places that when they are not locked away (can I say they? Is it still us?) they reclaim a bit of who they were. Would that I was without a tongue. The world would be better off not letting all the words come tumbling out, acting like a spray of water against the hot pavement. They’re temporary, enough to make a mark but not enough to stay. Just a bunch of nothing, not firm enough to ever take seriously. Is it my fault that my life has been one wandering to the next, that I’ve never tied down to one single place long enough to know what it means to be a part of the world? But still I want to be a part of it, to know what it is that I’ve been missing because—because even the capitol is beautiful. Even a place that takes the worst can have its moments, the quiet dark that sets down at night inviting a person to discover, this is beautiful.

They call it saints row—but I’d think that they couldn’t call it anything—a set of statues that line a narrowing corridor toward a set of tall stairs. Where do they lead? But the answer doesn’t come from the boney faced avox that wrote me her words at dinner; they are stairs that lead to elsewhere. And that’s just life, giving meaning to something because it exists. Sometimes a set of stairs is a set of stairs; sometimes a star is just a star. But I come because today is the day that my mother was killed. Today is the day that I found my father, and missed—by hours—meeting the boy that had my face. My brother. And it should be no more significant than the next day, or the next. Death is, not more. The world doesn’t keep turning when we go back into the ground, food for the worms. We’re a set of lonely creatures left on a rock turning round and around, but still. Still.

I think about, that we used to be the type of people where the world was always getting bigger. My head would rest in her lap and look at the stars and wonder that—there’s nothing further away, nothing so small as me. Except with her we were the universe; we were the wind in the trees and the dew on the morning grass. We were barefoot splashes through the river, and humming birds at dawn. And just because no one else ever saw us, or cared didn’t mean that we weren’t. Just like the stars that come at night don’t have anything to prove—to anyone—we burned, existed, lived. She taught me that even though I knew no one else, that there was a world that deserved seeing. I am the small piece, the one singular thing that may have ever laid eyes on a redwood tree in a thousand years. Who’s to say that for all their greatness, any capitolite ever accomplished as much? We have the world at our fingertips here and it’s not a world at all.

Am I like her?

The statues are decorated with trinkets, shiny baubles, and scraps of paper. Offerings because—it is tradition. It whispers through the alleyway but, no one answers the word—tradition. We follow in the footsteps of one another because there’s no better way. They are well worn with age, some with missing fingers, others with chips along the stone carved faces. Tradition that we offer what we have to them for protection. Maybe there is magic, and maybe there is a force that’s greater than anyone. Is it any better not to hope that we’ll be protected? What’s lost by tossing out a silver bracelet, or scrap of paper? I step along the cobble stones and fading light to stare at the face of a woman shrouded in cloth, her body covered in necklaces, flowers, and all manner of rubbish. Tradition. My mother would have given an offering. She would’ve knelt down in front of this woman, this face from long ago as though it would have made a difference before she died.

And now I’ll kneel.

I’ll get on my knees because, just like everyone else, I want what’s out of my control. It should have been so simple—to want to disappear into the nothing, to never be found again. My mother wanted the same, taking me with her in her arms after being cast out. Did they argue, my mother and father? Did Benat scream when she left him behind, a reminder that she couldn’t be forgotten? And what if she’d left me behind, instead? Where would the world have been if I had been in the arena instead of him? But those are dreams, like children not born, whispering only to the stars. She hid herself, and me, from the world. She knew that our separation was better than what we could live through—that a quick, sweet death could have been better than a life chained behind a fence, plowing fields. That’s what she tried to teach me, through smiles that spread for days. In the nights when I shivered by the fire, and my stomach ached.

But she wasn’t out of the world, she couldn’t be so separate. Not when she thought about the boy she left behind, and the man. We were the ones that paid the price, the ones that suffered through the storm between parents. Could I blame her for doing what she thought was right? Was it a betrayal that had us thrown out, cast away from the district, or a man that knew he couldn’t be the man he needed to be to my mother and me? It’s so easy for me to hate him, to say that he took away my mother’s life the moment that he had her leave. But there’s no anger, no fire in my stomach for him. It’s a heavy sadness, one that pools through my veins in thinking of all the times I’d never know what songs they sang, how they named the same stars that we named. That hate, that could make understanding so easy, it’s salt water. You drink from the tap until you’re always thirsty. And soon enough, it’ll drive you insane, until at last you die the husk of man you were meant to be.

I don’t blame either of them for being the ones that, for all that they knew—did the best that they could do. Maybe that’s the lesson, that we’re all doing the best that we’ve ever done, so that we can survive. Is that what this means for me and Freya? Our world’s just an approximation of the truth, of—hope, distilled to be a belief that we can make it away from everyone. We can escape the world; disappear, because we have one another. That makes us stronger than whatever we might have to face. It doesn’t make me any different than my mother, does it? But she wasn’t a bad woman, she wasn’t any less of a mother for what she had to do. I kneel, with my hands holding the little white rabbit’s paw I’ve kept for so long.

It’s tradition, to give an offering—tradition. I twist the paw between my fingers and stare. Tradition.

Who am I to be the one to be any different?