Tattered
"…it looks like we're headed for a train wreck…" –unknown song
Blue.
Peeta would have better words to describe it, I'm sure. Cerulean, indigo, simply even sky blue. I continue staring at the sky, watching a cloud shaped like those tiny rolls of cotton Effie kept in a jar on her vanity slowly drift out of sight beyond the frame of the window I stare out of. It slides off my screen, off my radar, and out of my life forever.
A light breeze causes the leaves of a nearby tree to tremble, but I don't hear a sound. Behind my window pane, sounds are strangely muted or non-existent, and while I vaguely understand the possibility that there are sounds beyond the glass, they are not real for me, here, within the glass bubble that is my world.
I hate my glass bubble. I fear my glass bubble. But most of all, I hate that I am afraid to leave my glass bubble. How weak of me.
This is the kind of day that used to be a pleasant holiday from all the other kinds of days, a reprieve from trudging through snow to check traps, and freedom of movement that I only knew when unencumbered by all the extra clothes I had to wear to keep warm on all the other kinds of days.
But today, all I feel is the pressure, the slight tightness in my ears. The geography books said it was a high pressure system ,indicative of great weather. All I feel is the weight, the indefinite heaviness of the air itself pressing down on me, making me feel like the slightest movement is like trying to swim through overly thickened gravy.
It's frustrating, and almost painful.
None of it is real. Nothing seems real anymore, and for someone like me, to whom reality was everything, this is the worst punishment of all. Nothing is real, I'm not real, and there is no reason at all for my existence. And for the thousandth time, I regret that I survived.
Did I really survive at all? Two Hunger Games and a war, and here I am. I vaguely acknowledge that the fact that I am here, staring through a pane of glass, means that I somehow survived with all my senses intact. Sometimes I can even feel my own heartbeat.
But does this really mean I survived? I exist in the world, yes, but is that surviving? Did I live?
I never gave it a thought before I was reaped. I had Prim, and I survived for the purpose of making sure she did also. As hard as it was sometimes, I knew what fear felt like, as it ran like icy liquid through my veins in the aftermath of a close call. If I died, who would take care of her? I also knew the all-consuming warmth of love, the pride I felt in her top marks at school, the admiration I felt as she worked feverishly on a broken and bleeding patient without so much as batting an eye at the things that had me retreating hastily from the house.
Now, there is nothing. Just me, watching clouds pass soundlessly by as I look on from inside my prison of glass, too numb and exhausted to even try to move against the bath of invisible gravy I was suspended in.
There was no Prim, so why bother trying?
Yes, there were moments when I want to fight it. When the pitch black anger overrides the numbness and I would do anything to feel again. Any feeling at all was acceptable.
And I would move downstairs, to the kitchen. In those times I would pick up my best blade, the one I'd used so many times to skin and butcher my prey, the prey that found its way into the stew pot, that kept us fed.
Only now, it is my own skin that blade bites through, my own blood on the counter. As if the only thing to do is to prepare myself to be consumed. It makes no sense; I have already been consumed-, by the Games, by Snow, by flames, by Coin's manipulations, by hatred, and by loss. What really makes no sense is how I have already been eaten alive, while my physical body still persists to be in this world.
And then, too exhausted to finish the job, I would stop fighting and retreat to my window once again, finding solace in the numbness I hate.