D7 :: Enoch Partridge

[L△LIA]

Name: Enoch Holmes Partridge
Age: Fifteen
Gender: Male
District/Area: District 7
Appearance:

LEE JONG SUK

Ever since he was a small child, Enoch was odd. It was only when his parents died of a terrible sickness six years ago that he developed his condition. Doctors say his mind might have been damaged by the same bug that took his parents, but the other children prefer to think that he was always this way. Enoch doesn't differentiate between the alive and the dead, the living and the inanimate. The boy is just as likely to be found conversing with a tree as he is a person; he's eager to hear the stories that the furniture tells. Because of this, he's often conflicting Millard on the facts and declaring that the histories recounted by the walls are true. He's friendly, although often tired - a result of staying up into the early hours letting his bedsheets pour out their woes or his floorboards chatter away. The other children in the house like Enoch for his gentle and caring temperament - despite his frequent babbling, he's the best listener to be found within the walls of Partridge House.

[/justify][/blockquote]Personality:

Acts as a sort of zen therapist for the other kids... and those poor abused teacups who always seem to have the most literal chips on their shoulders. Always listening, he rarely doles out advice in response, but when he does it tends to seem entirely off-topic and/or utterly cryptic — like life lessons learned from The Karate Kid, but translated into the language of trees. Wax on, wax off, Little Butterfly.

History:

Codeword: ODAIR
Comments/Other:

[L△LIA]

There are few people who remember the boy I was before my secret keeping days and those who do think of that child as an accidental dream — mountain fog and star-crossed smoke signals. I struggle with it too, recalling little more than the echo of smaller footfalls or the comforting lull of my mother's voice. She sang and I would dance, hip-shake turn tumble fully-body spin around the living room just so I could hear my father laugh at my antics, my little boy naivety mistaking his amusement for pride. Back then I was bad at understanding, too caught up in what was right in front of me to realize that deeper meanings were hiding beneath the surface. I'm better now, tuned into the whispering of everything that has ever waited to be heard.

As my parents faded away, I had to lean in so close to hear them speak and that was when I truly learned to listen, discovering through their deaths more life than I had ever known. Suddenly, the whole world was alive. I know that's backwards. So many people have told me — over and over and over — that I must've been turned inside-out when I was orphaned, because they think I've got it all wrong. Heartbeats do not belong to thin air and the skin of the dead possesses no memory for the sounds of voices, they say, but I can only smile knowingly in response. After all, I was once like them, deaf to the undercurrent of meaning within all things. My mother's last words did not fall short to the silence of her mouth and eternal stillness; they are a song that hums wild in the floorboards of our living room and if I could go there now, the melody would still haunt each creak as I turn in time to the ba-dum ba-dum oh la la la of her final breath.

Floorboards are the closest thing I have to a mother now and when I miss her the most I curl up against their wooden arms, quaking on my bedroom floor as I press my ear to the knots and whorls of the scuffed grain. I cannot hear her in them, not in this house of orphans, but the dancing patterns of the boards remind me more of her son's eyes than any reflection I've ever seen of myself in the bathroom mirror. Warm brown and always dizzy from too much spinning, cracked at the corners with his father's laughter. There's so much none of us remember, but these are things I'm terrified I'll forget.

Listening helps. Some trees know history lessons older than Panem and so the days when I would ride my bicycle down the sidewalks of the suburbs are part of their recent memory. They recall my tousled hair — burnt sugar in the sunshine — and the squeak of the rusting peddles; it rained a lot that summer and I had a bad habit of abandoning my bike in the middle of the yard, too distracted by the beautiful green flourishing around me to put things away for safekeeping. Sometimes I worry that the only things I know how to appreciate are all temporary and that I'll never know I love something until it's gone. I really miss that bike, you know. That house. Those summer leaves. My own name... there were a lot of wonderful things in my life and I wish I'd have loved them better and really listened to their stories when I had the chance. I can't help feeling deprived now.

Little by little I'm finding those missing pieces in the walls and stories of my new home and the mismatched family that took me in after my parents died. The children that woke up one day to find themselves forgotten and unwanted — sons and daughters of the breathless, whose mothers are ghosts and fathers are faded memories — were sent to Miss Partridge, a caretaker for the orphans of District Seven. Here we don't have to seek understanding... that was something we were given before we ever even thought to ask for it. Outsiders looking in seem confused by our habits or awkward ways of coping with our own battered and crestfallen hearts, but I think that's only because they lack insight into the dark fairy tales that bore us here. Instead of turning around when they cross our paths, they simply need to learn to lean in as I do and listen.

The world is loud with ten thousand million voices that hope to never be forgotten, despite the inevitable failure of memory. I do my part — bending an ear to the couch that enjoys recounting each soul it has ever held in its arms or leaning in close as I wash the dishes, so as not to miss the woeful tales of those poor, abused teacups who always seem to have the most literal chips on their shoulders. Around here, you won't find a better listener than me. If you have secrets, I'll keep them; if you have more joy than you know what to do with, then I can help spread it like the most beautifully infectious sickness that ever was.

Sometimes I get so caught up in all the stories surrounding me that it's hard to stop and turn away. The air is never dead, forever alive with so much to say, and when night falls the idea of sleep is only a promise that I'll be missing out. With my bedsheets whispering at me into the most hushed hours of morning, the only way I can shut my eyes and slip into Nod is if I block the world out with ear plugs or drown out the sound with a pair of headphones and the kinds of songs that don't have quite so much to confess. To be honest, it's the same thing I do whenever I go to visit my parents' graves — where I cover my ears because I'm still scared of the kind of quiet truths their tombstones might tell me. I don't ever tell people that's why there are always two small lumps of styrofoam or cotton stashed in my pocket or attempt to explain the headphones that must seem permanently slung around my neck. They must just think I really like music and excessive pocket lint.

Despite being so enthusiastic about anything others have to say to me and for as much as I jaw on about it all as if my mouth is twice as big as it already looks, I guess I still don't really know how to share my own secrets that way. Each day as I wake up in this new home with dark circles beneath my eyes and a new set of whispered memories, I feel a tug. It's the sense of knowing that the melody of my mother's voice and the crackle of my father's laughter are being pulled a little further away from me — another day into the distance — and that for as much as home and Holmes sound the same, I can't have both anymore.

[L△LIA]

I do believe this is doneeeee.

[cass]

Love him to bits <3

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