Capitol trains are, surprisingly, one of the few places I ever get in a good night's sleep.
At my own house, at Victory Place, the liquor drowns me into a half-lucid, half-hallucinating state of mind every night. There's no rest and no reality; it evens out the pain. And what can a lonely, single man like me fill a house with but bottles? Crates and crates of glass bottles are grotesquely stacked to the ceiling of my once-new house. In the first weeks after my proclaimed victory, they were only shots. A sharp drink in the wee hours of morning was guaranteed to take the edge off mutts or whatever else prowled my mind. Soon, though, fiercer phantasms floated the hallways and staircases. I could see Maysilee falling from the top of the staircase, then laying still as a stone at the bottom. That was when I stopped going to my bedroom to sleep at night; I couldn't bring my old-aged young self to step over Maysilee's hazy corpse at the base of the stairs. Every day I told myself that I could have saved her somehow, and she knew it. So there she silently waited for me to step over her body. She waited for an opportunity to grab my leg and drag me down, down to where I had chained her to.
I found a use for the infinite gold stacked up in my name, finally. I wanted to be where Maysilee was. The Capitol had brought us together once, by calling our names for the Games, and (though they would never know) they were going to do it again. Crates of alcohol came through the door and weighed down the blank floorboards. I was determined to sink the rest of my life into the ground with Maysilee.
So now glass is stacked upon glass everywhere you look. The living room, bathroom, parlor, extra bedrooms, they are overflowing with bottles. Except the bedroom- my bedroom- no bottles litter it. Because I still can't walk up the stairs past her young corpse. And when her screams rattle the windows and raise a perfect memory of the Arena, I throw bottles. At first I can barely hear the glass shattering on the walls and floor, but after a few crates have been emptied my ears wake up to a symphony of shards and the death cries are almost invisible.
Technically it is my house, but I know that isn't so. It's the Capitol's. Everything is the Capitol's. The thoughts, the food, the alcohol are the Capitol's. Even my own pathetic life is owned by the annual cycle of games, tour, games, tour… My bottles are for the Capitol.
