Because everyone has a story-the female morphling's story.
I'm not Suzanna Collins.
She couldn't survive her fifteen minutes of fame.
Hollywood Whore by Papa Roach
No one will remember me as anything but what I am now. I was strong once. I was even beautiful. I was powerful. I had the whole world before my fingertips. I earned my freedom only to find a different set of chains. I could have had anything I wanted—money, jewels, lust—but instead all I wanted was morphling.
When they pulled me out of the arena, I was barely alive. They had to reattach near severed limbs, stuff all my organs back in. It was weeks before they could show me as Victor. In that time, I first tasted my old friend.
The pain was so great that I couldn't register any other thought. When the clear liquid was pushed in my arm though, I felt my tense muscles relax as it pulled me under. The dreams were weird, but the sleep was so relaxing—so much more pleasant than the pain. Again and again, I went under and found comfort in it. Fantastic beasts chased me, but it was still better than the pain.
When they took it away, my body craved it. I remember standing on the stage shaking from its absence. It was like the death of an old friend and I was in deep mourning. It got easier over the months though, by the time I got home I was only reliving regular nightmares instead of drug-induced ones. At night, I'd still awake craving it though—sometimes it ruled everything in my mind. My family stayed with me though, and I never told them.
There were other things I never told them.
The first time I went back to the Capitol, I find out what winning meant. I was more powerless than ever before. My fingers itched for the drugs as I was passed around like a party favor. It wasn't long before I found that the money they paid me could be used to pay for relief.
Stoned out of my mind, I danced in dizzying circles like the harlot they wanted me to be. The world rocked and swayed as I did a sickening dance for a man who's craving was me—and I was the one with the problem. But the truth is, I didn't feel anything as he touched me, as he entered me or as I moved around the room swaying. Glass shattered, the sky cried, and when I next came down it was a Sunday.
I had never cried so much in my life. My hands were covered in cuts, bruises swelling on my body, and no memories at all were rooted in my mind of what happened. Just sickening, twisting, turning, spinning world where everything swayed in frightening rhythm to the music in my head.
I went through withdrawal again back in my district. It was more painful each time I returned to the Capitol, but I had a family I loved so I put away the drugs and stared with soul-less eyes at the next man or woman or both that would have me. Nothing was too shameful or degrading for them. Nothing was too painful.
It came to me suddenly as the cravings hit hard again. I couldn't kill myself…I couldn't run away—all I would do was get my family in trouble. I would not let them die for me and I could not continue living this way for them. Wouldn't it be better if I had died in the arena? Better to have never lived than to be the thin fragile barrier that holds them in place from hanging for my crime?
I wish I could just forget. I wish I could tell the Capitol off. I wish I had the power to say no, but I don't. I do the one thing I do have power over. I drive my family away. I take a little morphling at a time at first until they can't bear to be around me anymore. When they're gone though, I have to take more. The ache and loneliness is just so overwhelming.
More and more I party at the Capitol, and dimly I pass my family in the streets or the streets of dreams and they do not know me. I'm a vagrant in their life—lost to them forever and its better this way. I'm not better without them but they are so desperately better without me.
My need to forget becomes more urgent. The world is sunshine and flowers when I'm flying high, and when I crash there's no name for the despair I feel. I watch as hollow eyes becomes hollow soul. My skin starts to sag while I'm still young, and turn yellow. But each day before I shoot up, I know the choice I made—it was never the needle or my family but rather the needle for my family. They are only safe because I'm away from them.
My dizzying dances in the Capitol fade away. No one wants the hollow bag of bones I am. No one wants to see what years of abuse does to me and eventually them. Not one person in the Capitol wants to see or take responsibility for what they have done to me. So I dance for me now and paint flowers on my wall like the ones in my dreams.
Over years I covered the walls, and then recovered them—I even reached the ceiling. Nothing but bright flowers in my life for the flowers I was never given. My head sways in rhythm to the ever playing music.
I remember vaguely the year the girl covered the other in flowers. It's a memory ingrained in my mind for some reason I don't understand. But it brings me comfort that that girl had flowers at least once in her life.
When I hear people are going back to the arena, it doesn't bother me. When I hear I'm going back to the arena, it doesn't bother me. I go there every night, so why not every day? Why not go back and do things right this time? This time I would die and then I would really win.
The lights of their fire dazzle me. It is the girl who wove the flowers and now, now she weaves flames. What power does she have to be so resistant and whole? How is she so unbroken? She lets me paint her into a field of flowers—flowers like the girl Rue. I'm trying to let her know that what she did was good and kind. But it is the boy who smiles.
Isaac and I have been forgotten for years. Our victories unmemorable because of our form of escape, of our dear friend morphling. We were great once, we were gods once. And it's Haymitch who favors a different kind of drug that tells us the plan.
For years I thought I dreamed it, this idea of rebellion. And now it's close and I'm so weak and failing that there's not much I can do to help. But I want to help; I sway to the music, "What can I do to help?"
And Haymitch understands. He tells us to protect the boy who smiles and girl who placed the flowers that as long as they live the rebellion lives. I sway to the sound of it. The girl with flowers and the boy who smiles must make it out alive.
It's tough in the arena. I feel things that aren't real. I see things that don't and have never existed. My skin crawls and melts, thousands of things happen. But I've come down before. So I follow them though, it's the only thing making me keep walking rather than lying down and giving in to the withdrawal.
Then it happens. The creature lunges for the boy who smiles and I race to save him. Limbs that have long lost their strength are useful for one last time as I put myself between him and the monkey. The pain isn't so bad as I lay there. Maybe if the pain had been like this the first time I'd have let myself die rather than fight back. It would be easy to go like this.
I lay there as he holds me. Eyes so full of warmth, not condemnation for who I have become. I think that he can see me as I was twenty years ago before I was so damaged. Somehow I just know that he can see the best of me. Maybe he remembers the girl Noralee Vasco when she was strong and beautiful from some bygone game. He tells me how he paints, of the way the colors blend and I hear that kind of rhythm in my head again but I'm too tired to sway.
I paint the flowers on his face as he smiles down at me. He's the only one who ever gave me flowers.