bid my blood to run {luxa}

Axe to eye,

Shiver down my spine-

Ice up my chest and then

I'm awake.

Awake, breathing, alive.

xxx

I've never quite understood what it takes to dream. An imagination is a given, but what is it within you, exactly, that causes you to create a fantasy of something you want but can't have? Dreams: niggling demons inside you clawing away at what you thought you wanted leaving the bare, scarred bones of the initial concept.

My breathing remains heavy, a rapid pace with each breath slowly decreasing as the seconds hand moves slowly around the face of the clock. He watches me in this state, struggling as I lie here, ashamed and vulnerable, thrown into the fires of reality and left to burn into thousands of shards, ashes.

The moonlight swings in through the crack of my curtains, the beads of sweat slung onto my forehead in an unusual manner glisten with the white beam. My hand moves to wipe them. Cold and wet: my skin feels like stone as my palm slithers across it. I look at my hand and shake it.

I shuffle up from my covers, leaning against the frame of my bed like a child being told a story. Eager with passion and expectation, I've never felt more weak and confused. What was it? It felt too real to be false, colours too bright to be a figment of my imagination. People, skin touching mine, eyes glaring at me:

I could feel it.

All too well.

And the memories flood through the gate thick and fast, 1-2-3-4-5-6 ghostly faces swirling around me like I'm in the eye of a hurricane. Names obscured by the rising water, washed aside by the strength of the winds so much so I can't remember what they were called. But I can remember who they were.

Who they are.

There is another face, a seventh face that forces my fist to clench. A girl, long and thin, standing over me like a Queen to a kingdom, her people: cheering with fury and content. There was a victor this time, my mind managed to complete the story and create a girl with a crown to take her prize: survival. And although I hoped, although my skeletal fingers clasped onto the flames of life, my efforts were not strong enough.

I let go as an axe flung itself into my eye, yet I was not transported to a limbo.

Only to reality.

Footsteps cause a tremor in my breathing as my peeled eyes spy a shadow beneath the door. The cover hurl themselves over my head as I slouch down into the comfort of my mattress and just think. Lux Pelotte: the girl who was second best. There is a prize for first place, and a prize for second. One is life, the second is death.

My fingers tap together, weaving, looping over one another as they find themselves on my lap. The safety of being here alone feels foreign, a relief from pain and anger and excitement and everything in between feels nothing but distant and remote. What is stronger though, is the new found feeling of 'ineverwanttobereapedever'. One that is alien to a career from four and should stay that way.

Yet in my heart, that is all I can feel.

It's funny how quickly things can change. A snap of your fingers and you can be standing from a new point, looking at the world as we know it from a completely different perspective. Eyes spy the place you once stood and it's then that you realise how closed your eyes were, keep away from the wounds and harshness of what the world is really made of.

Panem: built with brittle bones on plains of flesh, a moat of blood for an ocean.

My soul shakes with fear, there's no escape for us any more. Perhaps the only way out is to be reaped, is to fight your peers and see their blood and guts and try to claim the glory and see what it is like to be between life and death and then just--

--die.

I don't like the thought, not one bit. I feel limp thinking about wanting to die, wanting to be returned home in a wooden box like a consolation prize for a weeping family. 

Lux Pelotte doesn't wanted to be reaped, not in a dream, not in a nightmare.

Not any more, and not ever.