chelsea carter : d4 : fin

The world was beautiful once. I've seen the sunsets, frantic paintings of orange and pink, hovering over the crystal blue sea. I've seen early afternoon light bouncing off my golden hair, making it seem as if the entire sun was contained inside my braids. I've seen a mother with her newest child, cradling the infant in her arms, staring at them like they were here to bring peace to our twisted world. But this? My family and I picking the remains of our home out of the sand? There's nothing positive I can find in this.

My older brother plucks a shattered frame out of the sand. There used to be a photograph in it, the only family portrait we'd ever done. It must have been washed away into the ocean, along with most of our other things. His brows furrow as he studies the frame, before ultimately tossing it into our "too far gone to save" pile. Technically it's just called the "trash" pile, but I decided that the title didn't fit. Our belongings, however broken they've become, could never be garbage to me.

"Do you think we could salvage this?" I hear my younger brother ask. He's holding a soaking wet bundle of cloth in his non-broken hand. I help him untangle it, and it turns out to be one of my mother's cardigans. It seems to have escaped with only a few small holes in the sleeves. I wish it would have been destroyed. I know my father will want it, though, so I take it over to him.

He's knelt by our box for undamaged things. Things we can save. It's mostly empty. He's flipping through a book, one that he must have kept on his bookshelf. It's unreadable now. The ink is streaming down the pages in thick streaks. "I'll trade you," I say, holding the clothing out with one hand.

When he looks up, he smiles. "I'm glad we've been able to save something so far."

He takes the cardigan and I take the book. It's obvious that my father and I are related. It's obvious that my entire family is related, honestly. First of all, we're very tall. I'd grown to five foot ten by my thirteenth birthday. My older brother is six foot two, and my younger brother has already caught up to my height. We've all got square jawlines and frizzy blonde hair. My brothers were lucky in regards to actually getting eyebrows. I've got a few fine hairs, but certainly not anything that could be considered a solid eyebrow.

The only way we differ from our father is our eyes. While he has brown eyes, my brothers and I have striking blue eyes, as clear as the ocean on a good day. The color is the same as our mother's was. Sometimes I wish I had my father's eyes. I don't like having any sort of reminder of my mother, especially on my own body. Besides, maybe brown eyes would look better against my skin. Despite constantly being out in the sun, I'm pale. I burn instead of tan. My lips are pale, too, and I try to keep them shut as often as possible to hide my teeth. I've chipped three out of four front teeth in various ways.
I return back to the "too far gone to save" pile. It's grown. My older brother is taking a break, sitting by the pile with his arms wrapped around his knees. He watches me toss the book in. "That was the one about the 68th Games," he tells me. "I can tell by the cover."

"Dad's favorite."

"Do you think he'll let us set this on fire when we're done?"

"That's rude. We loved these things once."

He pushes himself to his feet. "I can't say that we loved all of his books about the Games. Those were awfully boring."

We laugh. It feels like the first time I've laughed in my life.

When people first find out about my family, their reaction is typically sympathetic. "The only girl in your family? How do you do it?" Well, it's not that hard, really. Boys and girls aren't that different. My brothers are just as soft as I am. That's how my dad raised us. He doesn't ever talk about it, but he was a Career. It's weird to think about him being young and ready to kill. Growing up, he taught us to be kind. We were told it was okay to be in tune with our emotions as long as we didn't let them destroy us. My brothers and I have tried not to get too consumed with the whole losing our entire home in a tsunami thing. I mean, yeah, I'm upset. I'm devastated. I've lost everything. But I wouldn't let him know that.

I used to be so in awe of the world. I could look at anything and find something good in it. It shouldn't have been that way. I've had bad things happen in my life just like everybody else. My father said it was good to be optimistic, so that's what I wanted to be. It's amazing how quickly you can make a complete turn. I don't know what our future holds now. My father and older brother can't work anymore. Our neighbors are dying. I should've known better to think I was in control of things, but I was so blinded into thinking that there was light in everything, and there would always be good things waiting up ahead.

It isn't good to be stuck in the past, but that's where I often find myself. I'm holding on so tightly to our old things because it's all I've ever known. I don't want to forget our framed family photo, the one I cut my mother out of, or my dad's boring books that date back decades of Games. It's funny, because I felt the exact opposite when my mother left. I wanted to forget she ever existed. I suppose things change. It's going to be hard to move on from this.

We call off the search a bit later. We've spent days combing through the sand, and whatever we haven't found is clearly lost for good. I try not to think about that. My father leads us back to our tent. He had sent my younger brother to find food for dinner earlier. I dig into the bread and boiled chicken like a ravenous animal. Nobody talks after we've stuffed our faces. Nobody talks when we crawl into our sleeping bags. They all fall asleep, while I stare up at the thin fabric of our tent.

I wish I was younger. I wish I was four again. My older brother and I were careless, always running around the house. My mother was home with us, watching with a smile on her face. Normally she worked with my father, catching fish off the coast, but at the time, she was pregnant. The day my younger brother was born is the most clear day of my life. I remember my mother and I both staring at him in pure amazement. It cemented the fact in my four year old mind that the world was beautiful- and I believed that. For twelve straight years, I believed that.

My mother leaving was inevitable. Things had been on the rocks with her and my father. I was eleven. She didn't leave in a dramatic storm, or a big hurry. I just woke up and she was gone. My father said she moved in with somebody else. Maybe she had been having an affair. I had expected her to leave, but I was still angry with her. I cut her out of the family photo. I threw some of the clothes she'd left into the ocean. Even then, though, I was finding things to be happy about. A misshapen family photo? It's fun, it adds character. Less clothes meant less things for moths to get into. My father told me not to get consumed by my emotions, so I wouldn't.

Things were fine after that. My older brother and I helped my dad catch fish so he wouldn't have to hire somebody else. I was pretty bad at it, but it was all worth it when my brother and I got to throw the net aside at the end of the day and swim around. It was like we were kids again. The world loomed over us, threatening to tear us away from our home to kill other children, but we never let it get to us. My brother told me later that I helped him feel more positive about the world. Granted, he told me this as we were staring down the wreckage of our home, when I had already given up on finding something to smile about.

We weren't together when it happened. My older brother and father were fishing, I was finishing some schoolwork at home, and my younger brother was in town. Somebody spotted it from afar, and chaos broke out. We managed to get to higher ground, where we eventually found each other later, but not without some injury. My younger brother broke his hand. My older brother had a deep cut above his eye that needed to be stitched. I was covered in bruises and weighed down by the knowledge that our home had been destroyed.

The tent walls are swaying with the wind. It's enough to make me finally feel the exhaustion deep in my bones. I think I've been ignoring it, trying to convince my father that I'm fine, I'm not extremely bothered, we can always rebuild, I'm fine.

I don't know if I am.