By the time I feel up for leaving the cool numbness of the lake, the sun has burst its way through most of the surrounding trees to warm the grass and foliage below it. I wring out my hair a bit, which hasn't quite grown back to normalcy yet, and choose a soft patch of grass on which to lounge. It's strange now how different the warm rays feel on my body, ever since the… parachute mishap. Certain places feel the same because the fire graciously overlooked them, but the areas with the pink-hued grafted skin are much more sensitive to the change in temperature, and the mangled, scarred bits that were declared salvageable are partially numbed due to nerve damage. It elicits an odd feeling of being in pieces, a sensation too familiar to be culminated outwardly on my skin, because I clearly have enough of a problem hiding this fact as it is.

I was probably treading the lake for a good two or three hours because the sun is so high in the sky now that it's just barely beginning to dip westward. I got a lot of deep thinking out of the way beneath the soft current, a task that needed to be done for a long time now, but I had just been too numb and too scarred to backtrack very far without imminent failure. This sort of thing, or at least as far as the doctors say, is much easier to do with a trustworthy friend or therapist to be there and help separate the fact from the feel. But I don't have anyone like that anymore, so I've got to trudge through the grime on my own and let the foliage and scuttling of the forest distract me enough for me to keep an even keel throughout the self-therapy session.

So as I raise my arms behind my head and breathe in the sweet, fresh aroma of my empty Meadow, I begin to tick off things I've covered in my head thus far.

Fact one: Continuing to wallow through life as I have been is not only going to keep me depressingly morbid all the time, but it's also effectively halting any progress or future that could be paved in place of the trauma that I've experienced. After all, as they say, the past is supposed to stay in the past. It's been months since the last signs of war had faded from Panem, however temporary that may be, but that trait itself is a perfect reason for me to buck up and try to normalize my life again. What if some day from now, whether that's in decades or a few meager months, another division among our people is formed somehow? What if the Districts, in their previous slave-like repression, return again? Nobody can predict the future, so it's up to me to try and change my habits for the better and at least start pretending that life's worth living. Eventually, I'd like to believe it too. But for right now, I resolve to attempt to better my outlook on life in general, with the unfortunate exclusion of my nightmarish tendencies for the moment.

Two: I've got to try and control the nightmares. Refusing home pharmaceutical treatment from the hospital probably isn't helping, but I've seen some of the war survivors on those powerful herbal mixtures before and I'd rather feel the pain and terror than nothing at all. Morphling is completely out of the question. Sleeping serum could work temporarily, but either I'll keep needing more of it to knock me out dreamlessly or it'll become a requirement to get any sleep at all, both of which I'd like to avoid if at all possible. So unless I find some sort of soothing herb to try out in the Hob, I really feel like the only way I'll beat my terrifying unconsciousness in a healthy way is through Peeta.

Three, and this is a big one: I've got to try as hard as I can to mend my relationship with Peeta. I felt so bitter and abandoned for the longest time after District 13 had finally agreed to rescue him from the torture of the Capitol and he returned with nothing but an unconquerable hatred for everything about me. But that was probably the most selfish I had ever acted with Peeta so far. He was merely a pawn used by the Capitol to hurt me, to break my resolve and crush my spirit, but in the end of it all it was Peeta who was most hurt by the conditioning. Even to this day he has trouble realizing what's fact and fiction, has terrible and incapacitating flashbacks at times, and on top of the mental scrambling of his memories he's had to withstand horrible torture as well.

Stepping back from the most present dilemma involving the boy with the bread, there's also the fact that he so selflessly and wholeheartedly poured himself into me, protected me with every fiber of his being, declared his pure and willing love and adoration for me on more than one occasion to the entire viewing world. But when have I ever truly returned his affections with more than an empty screen kiss or choreographed hand hold? Sure, there have been raw and rare moments that I let slip my desire to preserve his life, my enjoyment of his company, the subtle glances and flushes of emotion that I keep so carefully hidden from most… but I feel as if his openheartedness was returned with barely the creak of a door in exchange. And now that his memories of us and his love for me have effectively been erased for him to start from scratch, I've realized that there's emptiness in me where his devotion used to be. I was always so preoccupied with so many other things, and there was also Gale that complicated things, and I never honestly stopped to consider how deep his love may run, or how devoted he may really be to me, or most importantly, how I truly felt about it.

I can see the deep orange of the setting sun through my eyelids, and suddenly my thoughts fill with everything I know about Peeta: his appearance, likes and dislikes, skills and quirks, things he's told me and things I've observed on my own, and then the memories of us start colliding into that mix. But not just the friendly passing waves or the mild small-talk, the truly emotionally-charged moments and I'm sad to realize how few and far between they really are. But now that all of my own weakness and dedication has been rendered so clearly to me, I can work to fix it and just hope that I'm not too late.

It's then I also realize that the optimism I lack in life and the nightmare plague of my sleeping world would both be essentially solved as long as I work toward getting Peeta to love me again, and that becomes my waking mantra as I gather my nightshirt and hunting jacket from the forest floor and prepare to head home.

But the most crucial thing to remind myself is that I'm not trying to get Peeta to love me out of selfishness now. I'm trying to return the passion for life that he once had a long time ago that made him so… pure and lovable.

Author's Note: I PERSONALLY think this chapter is a little wordy and possibly even boring, but I felt the need to throw in some sort of Katniss epiphany where she really takes time to inflect and dissect what's been going through her head after so much repression. This still only summarizes the 'tip of the iceberg', but I don't want to bore you all to death either. ;D Rest assured that after this chapter there should be more socializing and interaction with someone other than herself! God, she's so selfish… ;)

Oh before I forget! Thanks for all the great feedback and reviews so far, too! It really helps inspire me to write more, and more frequently!