blake. d4. wip

blake. d4. wip Mar 24, 2016 19:30:51 GMT -5

Post by fox on Mar 24, 2016 19:30:51 GMT -5

B L A K E

MY FAVOURITE THINGS
a list by the brilliant Blake
(for the amazing Ainsley !!)

✿

Mom says my head isn't on right – like if I tilted my chin up too high, or if I spun around too fast, or if I did a handstand and hung upside down –

oh yeah, she swears it could just fall off and roll far far faaaaaaar away. It's some loose screw come undone, clinking noiselessly on the ground that makes me shaky and silly and all that stuff she likes to say whenever I attempt to cook, or mix up my words, or try to move without breaking anything within five feet because – ah Ripred.

(You're still rolling around, but mom tells me you're already more graceful than I ever was.)

But maybe that's why she'd always reach for my hand when I was younger, a fist in her fingers as she lead me through the streets of Four: to steady my steps because I guess she knew.

And so do I now. Sometimes.
Enough to know that it might make you sad when strangers stare, that you might cry since people like to say stupid things. Ma always told me that none of that mattered, and I'm sure she'll tell you too. But on some days, it'll feel like the worst thing in the world – not because of everyone else, but because just because.

I wish I could always be here, to hold your hand through District Four and promise what other people think isn't important. But time moves too fast. And I guess even when I used to be vertigo and disequilibrium lying on the ground, eyes shut against the turn of a clock and the spin of a globe – I knew that between rotations and my unbalance, I would still fall
and fall
and fall
and the earth would never stop moving for me.

So maybe a list isn't enough to take the place of a brother – a brother that should be here to catch you for the landing. Maybe it's really just a bad excuse, and it won't mean much to you in the end. But I still hope that when you're unhappy and the world seems to be falling apart underneath your feet again and again, you can read about all the good things in the world and know,

know you'll be okay.

1. I wonder if you'll still remember your rocking crib when you've grown too big for it – the one I picked out because I thought it would remind you of the sea. You could sail over gentle waves in your dreams, go off to mystical places and return, all worldly of the secrets of Panem by morning.

I like sailing, but I don’t like the water – and people always say it’s such a shame because we live in district Four, because the ocean’s pretty and glittery, blue and jade.

But I’ve always been able to play pirates just fine on land, and that's what really matters.

I’ll build you a ship out of cardboard boxes and streamers and flags and all the other fun party things we'd have. And if we like it there, we won't come back. We could voyage to the continents beyond the green of our backyard lawn, and leave the rest behind.

Go somewhere with only you and me. Anywhere you could imagine, Ainsley.

...

5. Between those unsteady seas making cradles and the solid ground tripping safety, the great grandly adventures of dreaming up countries on sunny days and the real life endeavours out of town – my favourite place is the market.

But then again, I suppose haven't been to a lot of places.

Maybe, one day, if I get to see forest giants or mountains or the Capitol, become a flashlight explorer outside of night lights and wall shadows. Maybe, maybe, maybe then.

But right now, I only have the market, and I only have this I want to show you most.

I'll take you there when it gets warm enough, when spring comes in flowers and rain and pretty things.

And in any sense, our mothers would always try to rearrange some disorientated compass embedded into an organ where magnetism could not withstand the voyage. I still get lost a lot walking through the district – everyone calls it a bad sense of direction, but I swear to Ripred it's actually a sixth sense wanderlust.

Maybe on the way, we'll accidentally fall into portals, walk into fairy rings, end up somewhere crazy. Maybe we'll find a new favourite place, one way or another. And we'll prove to them that we were supposed to be explorers all along.

...

6. Okay okay okay – so the best booth at the market is three hundred percent the one with the cotton candy.

Sometimes, I just like to watch the people spin sugar into clouds, dipping the stick into the machine and collecting cotton into different shapes and colours. It's nice to look at; it's kind of magical, you know.

But mostly I just like the taste.

Our moms say I'm a glutton – like I would probably accidentally-on-purpose follow home a stranger with the promise of food, nevermind stranger-danger and all that stuff about poisons and bloody deaths in alleyways and precautionary tales of the sort in storybooks. Because food.

Weeell, an hyperbole and then some. But not false. Still, least I share. ♥

...

12. So for a person who likes eating just as much as breathing, I can't actually feed myself.

You could say it's my favourite pastime to terrorize with the stove. Although, I think I'm kind of amazing in the kitchen and everyone else seems to agree.

Except they think that in a way where I'm literally a monster type of amazing, and that it's amazing how six-feet-one-inch and uncoordinated I am doing this, or how amazing my delicious taste of burnt is, and how amazingly much I have an affinity for fiery disaster.

Anyways, it doesn't matter because I've got you, Ainsley !!! You seem to like my stuff, right? ~~No really, please.~~

Sometimes I'm allowed to help though, hold the spoon as ma says. And by the end of an afternoon, the gentle scents of creme caramel and honey ginger salmon and creviche and a million other actually amazing things would be mixing through the kitchen like magic.

I guess I'm lucky to have two stupendous chefs or I'd probably starve.

(And I'm too young and good-looking to die by seventeen.)

...

21. I thought I'd be making this list for you. Just for you. For when you're seventeen and probably a lot more graceful than I am now – not tripping up at each ten feet walked, constantly falling head first into everything tremulous.

But I guess I was wrong,

because sometimes I'll be a little bit sad, and sometimes I'll have had a bad day or worse. But then I'll start to make this list in my head, building up all the things that makes life beautiful into pillars, towers, castles, until the sadness seems small and insignificant in the shadows.

Until, I can hold the bad feeling in my hands and watch it fall underneath the weight of everything good.

I guess it's for me too.

...

29. We don't look alike and it's the hardest part.

I guess I used to wish I could swap pieces of myself like this – if I could be dressed in mom's eyes, soft and round and blue. If I could wear ma's nose, curved and defined in her elegance. I still want this sometimes. To look like them.

I learned to like the elements that were different: my height, my eyes, dark and sloped and sharp. My nose, straight and rounded.

...

38. You know, for all these favourites and all the days I've been writing out short thoughts, memories, lightheadedness,

for all the tuning out school lectures with both eyes still on the blackboard, eating one-handed at the dinner table, spilling ink on my pillowcase by flashlight, and penning down quick things when I'm happy or sad or rocking you asleep, pulling lullabies on the strings of a violin, dreaming of futures, and thinking about what I like the most in the whole world,

I've forgotten to tell you all this time –
you are my best thing and I love you, Ainsley.