D4 :: X. Dynamo

Name :: Xavia Dynamo
Nicknames :: Zsa Zsa, Xavi, X.
Gender :: Female
Age :: Eighteen
District :: Four
Faceclaim :: Mica Arganaraz

Girl, have you ever given a damn about anything?

You didn’t even know her name until it was on a death certificate. Reaping Day came and went and all you could manage was a glance accompanied by an idle murmur about how she looked a little bit familiar — someone you must have met once, but only for long enough to recall a sense of deja vu. It wasn’t until weeks later after you were watching her head explode into red mist that you realized she was a girl you had slept with once. For all the hellfire shivers the two of you traded back and forth that night, neither of you left the other feeling loved. Maybe that’s what made Gunner La Torre forgettable.

It’s ridiculous how you’ve made a habit of only feeling loss for things you never had. Days tick by aimlessly until you come across an impulse that strikes your fancy and then you’re chasing moments that might not even survive your next breath. These people, places, things — you don’t keep them long enough to name them. “Why?” Friends ask, siblings ask, strangers ask. You shrug. You don’t know. “Because,” you reply, an impetuous child who hasn’t learned how to argue with logic yet. “Because why?” They insist. “Because Gunner.” As if she meant something to you, like you’d known her name all along and hadn’t just learned it yesterday.

What you’re really trying to say is: because death. One day you’ll be as dead as that forgettable girl you didn’t love or like or give a damn about. You want people to look at the corpse in your casket and have something more to say than, “oh, her.” Souls like that could be carried away on the breeze of an exhalation. In truth you aren’t any greater or worse or different, you just have an awful lot of meaningless ideas floating around in your head that seem important because of a lack of substantial content to compare to. A sentence about a void must be bigger than any amount of nothingness; at least it exists.

Your parents tried to teach you that faith in life is more than just putting on a pair of Sunday school shoes. Going through motions doesn’t mean you’ve experienced anything, but you’ve never been able to see the difference. Instead you grew up trying to learn emotions like other kids learned to swim, still doggie paddling through your own feelings, just trying to keep your head above the waves. You have yet to be pulled under and so you choose to take that as a sign of skill instead of luck. What a fool.

It’s not that the lie of it is too good for the world to see past, it’s that you believe it to the point that there isn’t much else to you. Letting your hair grow as wild and dark as you want to be, those curls have become a cloud upon you, as if the sky is falling and the sky is you and so you are the end of all things. At a glance you become all that remains, at least until the attention you’ve caught looks left, right, up, down, anywhere else and realizes the trick of you. The world is still there; you never changed it. It’s just that mouth of yours is full enough to make a person believe anything could be tucked inside your lips, too distracted to notice that your cheekbones are hollow to the point of giving away the truth.

The void of you barely exists.

If there is heft to your heart, it is not measurable by gravity’s weight. You exist as something other than atoms, despite the warmth of your flesh and its ability to deceive both hand and eye. Daughter of sunlight, you are your own myth made mortal. Every step you take is part of a path to find a way to bring your body to this world — to touch someone and feel it beyond the occupied spaces of your fingerprints, to inspire the heavy weight of your brow to hold something other than disregard, to seek depth beyond the appearance of it.

Today you are your own shadow. Forgetting that double negatives cancel themselves out, you squint against the great fireball in the sky and suck in a breath through the filter of a cigarette. Burning isn’t such a big deal and as you hiss out smoke from between the gaps of your teeth, you imagine that you are exhaling the snuffed out soul of a girl who breathed into you once. Just once. You only pretended to breathe back because you didn’t believe that she meant it and even though you may have been right about that, there’s still something wrong about your non-reaction. Maybe next time.

Surely you’ll find it in the future, whatever it is. There is something that makes people hold onto each other even when there is distance between their bodies, tattooing invisible hearts upon their palms, and that’s a name you’ll remember. Person, place, or thing… you’ll give a damn. You don’t know how, but you know that you will. Until then you will be a headstrong hoax.

Why?

Because.

Because why?

Because death.