xx scarr, d2, finished

You were fourteen --

when you did it.

When you broke her

just like she broke you.

She didn’t see the hurricane she’d created, right in front of her eyes. She was always looking backwards.

A mistake.

A lesson passed down, and you passed right on by.

Candlelight setting, the scent of jasmine, wild berries, eucalypt. A broken light flickers overhead; a bad omen, turn back. If only you believed in that nonsense.

The flank of wood is unexplored, yet welcomed in your calloused hands. You used to cry yourself to sleep for the broken fingernails and bony hands of training, day in, day out.

(They told you it was strength, so you stopped the tears and counted the scars accumulating across your palms instead.)

When you enter her room, you could be three years old again, for nothing has changed. The black-out curtains lining every spare inch of wall cause the candle flame to shine a little brighter. And it’s cold, still cold. Always cold. She lies buried beneath the same ornate purple bedspread you once longed to share with her, on nights when the monsters in your dreams were a little harder to bear.

It’s easier to take on the world with someone by your side, in the bed next to you, fingers intertwined in a mother-daughter bond. A belief not shared.

(They told you not to trust anyone, so you fight alone.)

You pull back, swinging, let the tautness in your muscles do the work for you. Once, the lift would have caused you to cry out – an unbearable pain, heavy like the longing you once kept on constant display. Now --

no pain. You are flames and you are alight.

Crashing, and burning, a release of the explosion to split the world into quarters. Evidence in the blood pooling across those faded purple bedsheets; evidence in the screaming. It’s in your brain, ringing in your ears, and this is what you couldn’t have planned for – the sound, the crunch. Knives have cut their permanency into your very own flesh, but they are mere brushstrokes in that moment. Two moments, a collection of moments that stretches on, on, on.

You don’t know how to feel the remorse you find yourself desperately searching out.

(They told you emotions were futile, that they just made you weaker in the eyes of your opponents, so you let go of them all.)

(Kept desire on lock.)

You find that you don’t sleep quite as soundly that night.

.
.

He was exhausted. I couldn’t tell you why. I like to think even he doesn’t know the answer to that question.

They met as any two careers do – during hand-to-hand combat in the Training Hall. Two athletes with their whole lives ahead of them, ready to volunteer as tribute the first chance they got. What they didn’t account for was their crossing of paths. Love, lust, or something in between.

They married young; he convinced her to let go of that dream of Victory. He wanted a life for them – one that was promised.

I think she spent the rest of their days together resenting him for that. I guess it was no surprise that they didn’t last.

He told us he was leaving on the eve of my 7th Christmas.

He stood at the door with a single suitcase in his grasp, waiting for a stranger to take him away. Transfer, that was the word stamped across his forehead, the one that haunts my dreams.

Neither of them spoke; she didn’t try to change his mind. I wanted fire and fights and yelling and tears. I got nothing but deafening silence.

It was meant to be broken.

“Don’t go daddy! Don’t leave me with her!”

It’s no secret I was a daddy’s girl.

Was.

But while I wailed and screamed and begged for him to stay, he didn’t even look back.

The price of favouritism is steep. I didn’t eat for six days and was forced to watch my Christmas presents go up in flames. Tossed into the firepit, ashes to ashes. Mum made sure I knew my place.

We never spoke of him again.

.
.

I don’t leave my room for days after it happens.

My walls are my prison cell, and I’m a criminal waiting for fate to knock at my door and summon me to a trial I cannot win.

Alas.

Nothing.

No scalding lectures of perfection and poise.

Noise travels well in a small brick house. What once echoed down the hallways were pleas of power and determination. Now, each room is filled with shrill, horrified screams.

And I cannot

stand

it.

Noise travels well – so well, that even a whisper sounds like thunder striking right through my heart.

“You promised.”

I chant, over

and over

and over

in an attempt to banish the tears that roll down my cheeks at this turned page, this loss of youth.

Rocking back and forth, a ball of a girl living in paranoia.

So much.

The feeling that, in a sick, twisted way, from the room next door, she is smiling a phantom grin. She is proud.

.
.

Mum started dragging me along to her training sessions when I was three years old. When she wasn’t barking commands at careers-in-training, she would turn to watch me spar invisible men, participating in a dance I didn’t want to be a part of.

I just wanted to be a kid.

I wanted birthday parties and frills on my dresses and a house filled with laughter and playing team sports just to be part of a group. Instead, I got nails cut into stiletto points, because “anything can be a weapon if you try hard enough.” She taught me how to detect poison and brew antidotes, “a coward’s weapon, but a fool’s demise.” I got too close to fire too many times, with scars that serve as permanent reminders that “a flame is as much your friend as it is your enemy.” We spent our nights watching old Games recaps where I was forced to take notes, as if studying for an exam: “don’t make the same mistakes they did.”

She taught me everything she knew, from knife juggling to tourniquet tying. And when she’d exhausted all those paths, she would turn to the books, determined for more. For me, or for her, I still don’t know.

A sideline spectator, desperate to relive her own glory days. Desperate for her name to live on, since the world forgot hers.

She’ll never say it, but she doesn’t have to.

“It will all be worth it in the end.”

“I promise.”

Fate is calling.

.
.


She turned me into a lion with a lust for blood.

Double x, double r, double o. But drop the letters; they don’t matter around here.

They disappear in the smoke, as flames climb higher, impossibly so. Reflected in my eyes like amber fairy lights.

Figures cloaked in black stand around me to observe the cremation. Friends and foes, fellow colleagues, past students of hers. But none of us are in mourning.

A freak accident, they said. Slipped and hit her head. Died instantly.

So sorry for your loss.

Me too.

But the world was always destined to burn.