A/N: A short monologue. Won't be posting anything more until ~ Feb 7.
I wish we could do more to brighten up our new home. It's pretty drab really. There are plenty of things I miss about district 12; looking out the window to see the kids playing outside is just one of many. Our new home is stunning in it's technological achievements. They've accomplished so much in order to stay alive here. Still, that doesn't mean it's easy to get used to. Everything runs with military precision here and we're all expected to keep up. I'm most grateful for reflection time before dinner, when my family is usually together and I get to hear about their days. Today Gale will be the only one missing.
Vick and Rory seem to be adjusting okay. It's been harder on Vick, who doesn't know many of the kids in his class. A few friends of Rory's made it out of district 12, so he at least has some kids to play with. Rory likes school here better, too. He says they're actually teaching useful things and it´s not all about coal and the Capitol. Both boys, along with many of the kids from district 12, are assigned to an extra class after their regular school gets out, to help them catch up on what students here their age have learned.
There's even a school for Posy, though it's shorter hours and they mostly play and learn letters and numbers. Because of Posy and being a ´single parent´, my work hours are limited to during her school hours. District 13 has assigned me to the laundry service, which I don't mind. After all, I do have the background for it. Here we have large machines that do most of the washing, so it's mostly a matter of loading machines, pressing and folding, for me.
The first two weeks we were rotated through the different jobs in the washing room to see where we showed the most aptitude, and I've been placed in pressing and folding. Their laundry presses took some getting used to, as they are very different from my little iron I used in district 12. Still I don't mind the work and learned long ago the satisfaction of ending the day with a large pile of clean laundry.
At first I was uncomfortable with working such short hours. Now I'm used to being able to spend time with Posy before the boys get home from school. Back home, I always had Posy with me all the time but I was usually busy with the laundry service, cooking dinner, or any of the thousand other things needed to keep the family together.
Out of all the strange new things we are getting used to, the strangest part is not preparing our own meals. At home, I prepared a dinner from Gale's game every day until the last few months. Now we eat in the cafeteria like everyone else, at our family's allotted time. It's like we're no longer an independent family but one cog in a giant machine. I'm not sure what will happen to my family here. Everything feels so strange.
Posy and I are home in our unit playing 'I remember.' Perhaps I shouldn't encourage her to think about out past lives in district 12, considering how well she's adjusting to our new lives. But I can't help it. We pick a topic, and try to remember everything about that topic from district 12. Then we talk about how it's different here in 13. I just want her to remember our family traditions. She's so young, she could forget her whole life in district 12 if we let her. I just can't allow it. So today we talk about dinner. How she used to help me set the table, and how different the cafeteria is. I can see she's already forgetting things. How do I know what to remind her, what's worth hanging on to and what she's better off forgetting? It would be easy enough to let her forget he painful parts of life in 12, but I know that's not right. It's much harder than that. So we play our game, and I help her remember.
Tomorrow Gale is escorting Katniss to district 12. I'm sure it will be hard on him to see it again, and devastating for her, so I guess I´m glad he wants to be there for her. Still, I worry for Gale. He's so invested in Katniss. Now that the Capitol is holding Peeta prisoner, I don't know what will happen with them.
Gale wants Katniss to become the symbol of the rebellion. She practically is already, but the rebels want her to be a spokesperson of a sort. I think she's too young to have so much expected of her. I'm afraid of what it will do to her, and what that will do to Gale. He's so young an idealistic. He thinks everything about the Capitol is wrong, and anything the rebels do must be right. He looks up to Beetee and Boggs and President Coin, I can tell. And he's been so busy with their defense meetings and training and Katniss, I feel like I've hardly seen him since we arrived here. I have of course - he almost always eats meals with us. But I still feel like he's slipping away from me.