"I wish I could freeze this moment right here, right now, and live in it forever." These are the words that echo in my head, weeks? months? after they have been spoken. They are the words in which I hold onto sanity, a sense of real in a muddled world.
We were on the rooftop, I recall, a few days before the Quarter Quell. Her head was on my lap and I was fiddling with her hair, I believe, pretending to be practicing my knots. Suddenly I blurted out the one thing on my mind. How nice it would've been to freeze time, to never move onto another day. I certainly wouldn't be here now.
It was real, I know that for sure. If it wasn't I'm positive I would've seen the clip by now. Unlike our other time spent together, this was not staged nor planned. Unlike our other time spent together there were no choreographed kisses, no direction on what to say or when to hold hands.
In the Capitol everything is fake. Makeup coats their faces, erasing blemishes and creating a flawless, too perfect face. Plastic surgery creates unscarred skin, skin dyed so oddly you wonder why they dyed it in the first place. Fabric flimsy and expensive clothes their bodies, bodies so fake you could merely touch them and they'd crumble into dust, revealing a pitiful, unrecognizable human being. If you could even call them that. Garish nails long enough to use as a scraper cover their regular nails, false eyelashes in neon pinks and blues, I can list countless examples of how fake the Capitol people are.
But it's not just their bodies that are fake, their government is too. Lies passed down from one to another, murders kept in secret until the truth is buried impossibly underneath a pile of secret destruction. The government leads people to believe that, at least in the Capitol, that it's perfect, flawless, just like everything else there, when the opposite is true. The people in the districts know that.
Yet this is the one moment in my tangled, twisted memory that's unscathed from the Capitol, far away from their sick, fervent grasp. It's the one moment that's not fake, unlike so many things in the Capitol. It's simple, pure, a moment untouched by their forces. A boy and a girl, enjoying their last day of freedom, of peace together. How can you corrupt that?
The Capitol fails to. They use every moment in the Games, from the reapings to the epic finale, against me. All of the victory tour and Quarter Quell is shown but the footage is twisted. Or is it? I can't remember what exactly happened during the ending of the Quarter Quell. Was Katniss shooting at the force field or was she shooting at me? I don't know. I don't know. All I know is the one memory they can't take away.
They can't take it away because it's the one memory I have that's true. And if I don't have that then I have nothing. Nothing at all.