At first, every sound was amplified: Greasy Sae's quietest whisper may as well have been a scream, the sounds of Haymitch's bottles clinking together were as if he was shattering glass in my ears, even my stomach's desperate growls, offered as a plea for food, sounded as if a hovercraft was perched on my belly, engine roaring and ready for flight. They came together into an unbearable swell of noise, pulsating against the edges of my skull and filling up all of the hollow spaces where my memories once lived. I tell myself that this is why I allow my sofa to become my casket. I imagine the stitching coming apart and finding a new home in my skin, weaving in and out until it is impossible to tell where the furniture ends and I begin.
There has been a fire smoldering across from me since the day I arrived home, but I don't know who comes to tend to it. Probably Greasy Sae when she comes to force me to eat, or Haymitch during his occasional visits. He came by a lot when we first returned from Thirteen, but I am too despondent even for him – and his visits are few and far between now. My most reliable companions are the shadows, which are constantly changing their shape and stretching out against the walls like fingers creeping toward me. They breathe in time with me and seem to expand a little more with each inhale, until they surround me and hold me hostage. I stop trying to escape after a while; I learn that they will eventually be scared away by the sun and retreat into themselves. This is how I measure the passage of time.
It's warm on the day he arrives back in Twelve, but I don't notice. I had long ago been devoured by an all-consuming kind of cold; it starts by numbing your nose, then your ears, your fingers, your toes, working its way over you until you're not sure if you have a body at all, or if you're actually just a long-held idea caught in the barely visible wisps of an exhale.
It is the sound of digging that breaks me from my daily ritual of sitting, staring, and patiently withering away. I don't consciously register the new sound, but I respond to it involuntarily and stretch out my creaky joints to move toward it. Perhaps my body has assumed that this is the siren song of my grave finally being dug, and I am being beckoned to it.
But as soon as my bare feet touch on my splintered front porch, I know that I am not here to embrace my imminent death, because there in front of me is Peeta. Even with his hands wrapped around my throat, he was never my reaper. He has arrived as if in a hazy daydream, sunlight glinting off of his blonde curls, shovel scraping against the sun-hardened soil next to my house. When he says "for her", gesturing at the wheelbarrow of unkempt primrose bushes beside him, I realize that the usual din that had become my daily soundtrack has been muted.
I had burst from my front door and come up to stand beside him with the same impulsivity with which I had exclaimed his name into the silence of the night during our first games. Back then, when I realized what I had done, I clapped my hands over my mouth to quiet myself. Today, I do more of the same and retreat inside, back into myself – but I cannot cool the heat that I feel in my cheeks, reminding me, for the first time in many months, that I am made of something other than ice.
At first, I am absolutely positive that he has come to deliver Prim's flowers as a final goodbye, and then will be gone, off to spend his days washed in sunbeams and ocean spray with Annie in Four. Perhaps he'll prefer Johanna's company, and pass the time regaining his lost strength by axe-throwing, and laughing at Johanna's irreverent jokes in Seven. Or maybe he'll decide that we are all too broken for him, and join one of the nomadic tribes that have assembled since the rebellion and travel throughout the country. I can see him moving from place to place with a group of artistic, musical strangers who understand his special brand of magic. My stomach clenches as I envision him falling in love with somebody who can create art with him in a way I never could. Their days would be spent dancing around a fire and using their fingers to paint anything they could pretend was canvas. As the sun set, he would bathe with her in a river and scrub the paint from behind her ears and the heels of her feet and all the other hard-to-reach places of her body while they laughed and wondered aloud how paint ended up there in the first place. He would look at her in the way he used to look at me.
I am so aggressively locked into this newfound terror that I sometimes find myself yearning for the times, just a handful of days ago, when I felt nothing at all. As it turns out, though, I spend those days gripped in nauseating anxiety for no reason, because he keeps showing up – in my yard, in my kitchen, in the town square, even out in the woods with me – every day. Some days, we laugh and make jokes at each other's expense and embrace life with a freedom I had never imagined for us. Other days, either he or I will be so lost in our own personal anguish that we sit silent. No matter what the day brings, one thing remains the same – he stays with me.
On my bad days, when a cacophony of disembodied voices from my memories begin to assemble into an angry choir and pull me under, I train myself to listen for him instead. I like to listen to the crunch of his shovel as he digs into the ground outside my windows. I like to listen to his footsteps – one heavy and one still loud, but not quite as leaden – as he climbs the stairs to my front door to join me for breakfast. I like to listen to the scratch of his pencil on paper as he draws in the plant book.
On my good days, I brave the deafening sounds of the birds and the wind to take the 50 or so steps to his house, and make myself a new home on his couch. There, I like to listen to his paintbrush against blank canvas while he works in his study, or the small sounds of exertion that he makes as he kneads dough for loaves of bread.
After a handful of weeks slip by, I come to realize that, the way Beetee's bow once came alive at the sound of my voice, my ears are trained only to Peeta, and the rest of the world has gone quiet.