tell me and i'll forget ☾ { d3 train thread }

[D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza]]

WYLLA LYSANDER




 

There is an eerie ringing in my ear—it's my Mother's voice singing lullabies and prayers with a hope that they will keep me safe. She's starting a long process of wrapping me up to keep me from breaking, as if I am porcelain that needs protecting, as if children are defined by their weaknesses and made strong only be the actions of elders. She's wrong; I rebel against her weeping and keep a straight face.

I'm not going to break. She wants me to break like I know I am going to die, but I don't know that. Certainty is a blissful ignorance tailored towards those who fail to believe. I believe, I think to myself, because nobody alive has ever told me that dreaming was wrong of a little girl.

My feet dangle from the seat of the train, eyes fixated on the landscape that rolls past with every second, before disappearing like the footsteps I've walked and the home I've left behind. I bet there are a thousand steeping stones and dowsing rods in the wilderness that passes me by; I bet there are enough for every child in Panem.

Freedom tastes sweet. A little bird spreading their wings and flying the nest—that is what I am. I've managed to break the walls which confined me. A prisoner to the place I knew as home: the place where I was stuck at an unruly height and where my imagination could only run as far as barbed wire fences and tall men in white suits and helmets. Now I can see the world that truly is; the places, the people, the sounds, the feelings, and the moments which are exclusive only to those who dare to dream.

I don't have a reason not to dream—I've been through the guts, I'm just waiting for the glory.

"Don't you love it?" I lean my head against the window, the vibrations rocking my head like a mother to her baby. "I love, love, love it. The outside, I mean."

The other volunteer sits opposite me. I look to her with eyes that have been drained by the flowing colours of the wilds that floods past us. I look at her, not as if one of us going to die, but more as a friend. I suppose that she is the only thing I'll have to remind me of home. I've just kissed goodbye to physical reminders, and I plan on abandoning the emotional ones before I set foot in that arena.

I have to wave goodbye the old me and embrace the new: the one who will see the world, who will be three inches taller, and who will claim back the childhood she was robbed of. Embracing the new doesn't have to be the unfamiliar; growing up doesn't mean losing who you are.

And I want to grow up. I want to grow up really badly.

Mum says overcoming myself is the worst idea I've ever had, and I suppose that in some ways, she is right. But this isn't Three anymore; this is wider, bigger than anything I've ever known. Changes have to be made, pieces have to be broken and mosaics have to be forged from the teeny tiny shards I'll collect. The same me, but different. Remade. I figure that Mum is scared that she will lose me along the way—but what does a dead person really have to lose?

Sometimes I hate being haunted.

Perhaps that is something our mentor can teach me to not care about. I wonder what it is like living with the ghosts of twenty-three people, one alone seems difficult enough. Voices calling from all angles, each posing questions and answers that are rephrased, and broken and rebuilt, just to induce a state of confusion. At times, they are the stuff of nightmares, and at other times, they are the stuff of dreams.

One thing I am sure of, though, is that I would never let my ghosts go. Their screams might always be there, but Mum says that silence is an unbearable pain.

I pull my knees into my chest—isn't that type of hurt something I'm going to need to get used to?