undisputed {patricia}

[rook]

patricia valfierno

victor of the sixty-eighth hunger games

When I dream I often expect to see the faces of the people I killed, but it's been years since I slept and saw Crusader's thousand-yard stare, or Cha's gaping, breathless mouth.

No, the ghosts I'm visited by are far worse.

The face of a girl who I haven't seen in fifteen years, wonderings of what would be if I'd tried to make things work. A man who looked after me when no one else wanted to know me, who shared what I went through - who understood. A woman dressed in black on a balcony, sharing a cigarette with another lost soul.

The intense absence of what could have been burns harsh in the dead of night, when you're led alone on a bed made for two, a great space adjacent to you. You stare at the ceiling for hours, before being dragged into nightmare after nightmare, drowning in the darkness where they're all sneering at you, radiating in their happier without you life.

Yeah, love fucks you up like that.

I was in bed for for fourteen hours last night, and I don't think I slept for even half of that. I'm in a negative cycle of being awake for forty-eight hours at a time, then sporadically trying to catch up for the rest of the week. I can feel just how unhealthy it manifesting in shallow breathing patterns, occasional panic attacks, and in the soreness of my chronically fucked ribs - I can thank Galaxy for that last part.

The floorboards creak wearily as I make my way down into the kitchen. It's not until I'm boiling the day's first pot of coffee that I realise I'm still wearing my work clothes from the night before. With a groan and an unreasonable amount of effort for this hour, I force myself out of the overalls and swipe a yellow sweater that was hanging on the stairway bannister.

My house would set alarm bells going off in the heads of any well-adjusted individual, but no one's been to see me in weeks, so I'm spared the hollow lectures on looking after myself. See, no one really cares how you're doing, they just like to say that they've checked up on you so they can give themselves a gold star.

A peanut butter knife smeared on the draining board. Yesterday's washing left half unfinished, cardigans and dungarees sprawled over the back of a tattered couch. The smell of dust and uncleaned plates mixing unceremoniously. This is what you call: being in a rut. Too tired to be productive, too bored to do nothing, caught in the middle of all your indecision.

I step out onto the patio barefoot, eyes closed, the morning sun kissing the freckles on my cheeks. It feels nice to be alive today, which of course means I'll be dealing with waves of overwhelming guilt and fight off bouts of intrusive self-hatred.

I'll manage - twenty years of it and I'm still undefeated champion of still being alive.

Not sure how, not sure why. I've given away so many different parts of myself that I'm not even sure what's left.

I'll tell you what remains of Patricia Valfierno - a tired relic of a woman hiding away in her garden and working in the dam, keeping busy and saying she's happy to keep the ghosts quiet. Saying she's making a difference to counteract her sins.

Red is a hard colour to paint over, it turns out.

There's always a lingering stare, or a mutter lost behind the rushing water and clanging metal. People say I look well, people say I'm doing good, but I can feel the weight behind the brief silence that follows - there's a comma there, not a full stop, but they don't say the rest. They let me populate that with all my insecurities and guilt.

It'll never be enough. I'm never getting out of this net positive. Not in the eyes of this community, or Panem beyond. They'll never let me rest, even when I've given everything, even when I've nothing left to give.

When the market trade is fair, and the Peacekeepers stop extorting local businesses with protection costs and bribery, then can I rest? When the water runs clean and the air is clean, when our green energy plan stops the children coughing up dust from their lungs, then can I rest? When they stop shipping back coffins, just a size smaller than adult, then can I rest?

The only rest they'll ever let me get is when I'm six feet down and rotting in a box, and even then those faces of lost love and lives taken will still be sneering at me from beyond.

I wash down the thought with the rest of my coffee, before staring down the world from my doorway, still undefeated.