harvey . seven [fin - cbd 2]

––  H A R V E Y


Children from Seven aren't meant to know what survival means.

It's what you learn when the shadows of the woods dance and taunt you, trees too tall for anything good and a forest too loud and too quiet at the same time and rows and rows of unmarked graves after each Winter comes and goes. To be born in a district like this means you take and accept the hand your dealt no matter how wrinkled and bony and forgotten it may be, no matter how much it means your stomach will ache and your bones will scream and the blisters of an axe held too tight will remind you of your worth every time you so much as hold something.

Children from Seven aren't meant to know what survival means unless they force it.

If I believed in a higher force I would have said that they sent it, that book buried underneath years of forgotten memories and fields of dust in the back of the library, with drawings and diagrams of how to lace the metal handles of an axe into your hands and how to swing a weapon down into bones instead of the wooden coffins those from Seven lose their lives in.

"Rowena, look at this shit."


--


Survival turns into something different when you learn how to take it for yourself.

It becomes moonlit nights and holes in fences and feeling the cool metal of a weapon whenever you grab it, it becomes broken noses and wounds leaking red and scars littered across your body. It becomes attainable, it becomes giving yourself what you need to fight back.