Long & Lost :: [Jackal + Cygnus]
Aug 10, 2015 18:00:18 GMT -5
Post by L△LIA on Aug 10, 2015 18:00:18 GMT -5
Forgive me for breathing. Here, I can't help swallowing the air down with greed — it's so sweet that I can't believe it's real. The blue of it curls into me, tangible upon my tongue, and I'm licking my lips, spun sugar in the crooks spilling up and out and on and on into an infinite horizon. While the edges of the Capitol's skyline are greased smooth and clouded in a perpetual smoke show, this land is rough cut, raw, unforgiving. Everything is dirt, but nothing dirty. My brothers in their silk shirts and gleaming shoes bear no resemblance to the cattlemen dotting the landscape. These people dress themselves in denim as if it's armor, their skin crackling beneath the sun's heat as they smile at me while tilting their heads — half in greeting, half in confusion. The jewels upon my fingers glitter in the afternoon light as I wave hello in response. Some of them look at me as if the sky is falling. I am the smirking fist that cracks the earth's ceiling, the crash of spun glass clouds, and the fire desperately trying to hide the aftermath evidence of what I've done. Everyone seems to know this instinctively, from here to the Capitol, and I'd hang my head to hide my face from it if I could bear to live out my life so willfully blinded. However, after thirty-one years of this, I'm nearly used to it. At the very least, I'm close enough to shake the unspoken accusations off with a flutter of my eyelashes, casting the devil of doubt as far away as I can throw him. Grabbing onto the fence surrounding a patch of grazing land, it is barely more than one thin tree turned horizontal attached to another and another. Knots and the stubs of small branches are a new language of braille beneath my hands and I pull myself up to stand upon the lower rung, the upper beam biting into my shins beneath the gauzy layers of a dress that lends no protection. It's not uncomfortable enough to stop me from leaning forward into the breeze, arms held open. This is not the end of the world; this is the beginning of it. The grassland before me stretches itself out wide and sparse, as if it has no secrets to hide. I've never seen such naked terrain, too used to sky-swallowing cityscapes and forests, but that doesn't make this a disappointment by comparison. It's new enough, strange enough to be amazing. Despite the expressions of the people I've passed by, here, the sky looks too big, too blue, too beautiful to fall. |
