rémy merino ✴ D8 ✴ fin!

Everyone has dreams.

They’re dangerous things, those far off hopes and goals that sneak into your head and make you think that there might be something to make life worth living. Something better, greater, bigger. Something outside of your daily routines, something that can make you stop dragging your feet and hanging your head. They’re more than just a little idea, more than a New Year’s resolution to be forgotten by the second day of January. They can get etched into every part of your being, can rule your life if you let them. Sometimes, dreams can become possibilities.

Most of the time, they don’t.

So how can you deal with a dream, a goal, an ambition too big for the mind that holds it? How do you tell a little boy who has his huge, blue eyes trained on you that he can’t do it, that he can’t become the person he wants to be, can’t do the things he wants to do? How do you explain to him that his future holds pricked fingers, gallons of battery acid, dye baths and weaving machines that will break his heart, if not his back? How do you kill the only thing that keeps a smile on someone’s face?

I suppose you don’t. I guess, sometimes, you just can’t. No one told that little boy that he would never be able to do it, that he couldn’t go to the Capitol and see the outrageous gowns that he sketched in the corners of his notebooks in fabric, that he’d never dress the next Victor or the last tribute. It was never that he couldn’t do it, it was just that it would be hard, that it would take a lot of work, that honey, you should get back to your homework, and please remember that you have to go to the factory tonight at 5; don’t hunch, sweetheart, you’ll curve your spine forever.

Maybe they should have told him while he was young, while his eyes still lit up when he realized it was close to the Reapings. He knew it was horrible, knew that lives were lost and souls were shattered, but it meant getting to turn on the TV and know that there would be a picture. It meant getting to see the riches of the Capitol, see just what could be done with the silks and laces that he worked so hard on day after day. It meant knew drawings, new ideas, another piece of paper to rush to this seamstress or that tailor, and later to a classmate who knew a girl who’s aunt’s best friend was close with the mayor in hopes that it would be sent away.

Wishing that he could get out. Become something. Become something as grand as the creations of his mind. Get immortalized in suits and hats and giant gems hanging from gold. Someone had to think up the things that he saw, so why couldn’t it be him? Wouldn’t he know better than anyone else just what to dress the District 8 tributes in? Couldn’t he show the Capitol that there was more to the Districts than a bunch of workers, that they could do something incredible too?

As he got older, he realized that he couldn’t. That there was no hope for the poor, that rags to riches was a story that went untold not because it wasn’t a beautiful theory, but because it was just that. A lie for the masses, another lie meant to quell rebellions. The hope for a life that would never be lived by any of them, any of the underdogs, was the one that satiated the Districts. He learned that they were living on bones, on scraps, on works of fiction, but he couldn’t stop. There was no way out. No escape.

And there was no way for him to still his hand when a new colour swatch came into the warehouse, another pot of dye was boiled for this trend or that season. What was the purpose of a hopeless dream? There was none, not really, but this was what he was. A designer. It was his outlet, his way of getting through each and every monotonous day, of not breaking down the first time that he knew he might end up in the Capitol, might die in that world of painted smiles and feathered lashes. He was an invisible artist, tearing himself up every time he shredded his doodles and let them fall into the nearest trashcan.

That was when his parents started loving him, when they became proud of him. It was when he was crumpled and ripped that they looked at their son as a success. After all, there was still light in his eyes, he still laughed just the same. He still had all his little quirks, sounded the same with the slight lisp that accented his soft voice. Every time he got shy, which was often indeed, his eyes still dropped under his bangs and his thumb went up to his lips, worrying the full flesh that he found and peaking back up from underneath dark lashes and an inky fringe. There was nothing to him that seemed all that wrong. It was better this way, better when he was living with reality, not some sort of delusion that he was different enough to matter.

How dangerous it was for him to think he could ever matter. He was never meant to matter. He was meant to do the things he was told to do by the people who held more power than him. Meant to stay put where he was in District 8, where the closest thing he’d get to opera-length gloves and trains that went on for days was the kidskin leather that made them up, the satin that would someday run over a polished floor that luckier people would see their reflections in. People who had everything he wanted and still complained about it, who whined when they were told to meet a deadline and rolled their eyes when their customers wanted an adjustment in the number of pearls that swam in and out of the lace that circles their slender wrists. How stupid it was for him to think that he was ever meant to be anything but another sheep, following the herd day after day until it came for the slaughterhouse.

(How silly that even at fourteen, still his homework has to be rewritten on clean sheets of paper as empire waists and tuxedo cuts spilled out from underneath his pen.)

He knew better. He did.

But how do you completely kill a dream when it becomes everything you are?