briske libitina, d6 [bio resub, done]
Jan 4, 2020 23:27:13 GMT -5
Post by cameron on Jan 4, 2020 23:27:13 GMT -5
original bio here
briske libitina
district 6
22 years old as of 84th
Hair sticks to your face in thick, wet clumps. The walls of the bathtub are cold against your skin. You scream.
There is something animalistic about you now, even more so than before, more than when the hounds wailed through your bloodstream and locusts swarmed your cloudy mind. You always stifled their shrieks with drugs, drugs, and more drugs; now that you’re clean, there’s nothing to tame the beast that is and has always been you. The crooks of both arms are purpled for life, repeat entrances scabbed over and raised all along your pale skin. Knees rattle against each other, a constant nervousness you can’t escape without your preferred vices.
You aren’t the same now that you’re better. You’re much worse.
Your heaving chest lulls to a stop, shaky breaths bating, reverberating against the alabaster-coated steel. Your heart pounds harder for every second you quelled your own blood flow, beats caverns into your chest for every day you restricted its purpose. You are deep, and hollow, and so new to yourself you feel alien. Chipped teeth bare into your flesh. You don’t feel it (you feel it far too much) but you know you can’t keep screaming, can’t let the growing, guttural sounds of your pain rush out of you like a zephyr you can’t control. Not here. Your own little place in the world has never been of your concern before, not when your thoughts were muddied and distorted, when your body had filled whatever space it could, when your self-awareness started at the base of a syringe and ended in your veins. There’s nothing to hide behind anymore. You’re wide open.
It didn’t come easy. It still doesn’t. You find yourself every day needing the release you’d taken for granted, and every day wrestling with your own demons, with your mounting desire to fall back into familiar habits and harmful situations. You’ve failed yourself three times so far - most recently when the reaping passed and your futile existence laughed you awake. You’d scrambled out of your sleeping bag and found your way into just the right bed with just the right man and just the right drugs, and now your hands press into your temples like your own walls are caving in, because they are, because you let them, because you are weak.
You hate that daylight blinds you, that the rays of the sun burn your eyes and send tidal waves through your head. The dark is your only solace, your only reprieve from the misery you can’t afford to cut. But there’s nothing for you in the dark now, nothing but the whispers of a past you’re fighting to outrun and the beckoning of new, fresh heat. You’re conflicted in the nighttime, when you feel less strained but more pushed, when you can relax from the headaches but the remedy is at your fingertips.
You climb out of the bath, pushing a sweat-soaked wad of hair aside, and look at your own reflection. You study the freckles dotting your face, something you hadn’t taken the time to notice in years. You’re still too thin. Your bones protrude at your collarbone, your shoulders, and the bags sagging beneath your eyes are as purple as your elbows. There’s a lifelessness about you you’ve never seen; you’re certain it’s been a part of your for years. You hate how unfamiliar with yourself you are. But you are thankful you know now, thankful you are able to see yourself, see your faults, see your flaws. They multiply as you watch yourself, but you’re glad to know you weren’t the perfect piece of shit you’d always thought.
You’re better now.
It’s been years since you climbed on stage during the reaping and emptied your insides, and the girl who managed to volunteer then is thriving now. Even though she died. Even though she had her life stripped from her soul. You think you’re the same: you’ve died, and you’ve been reborn, and your second (or third, or fourth, or eighth) chance at life is something so much more precious than you’ve ever known. Quest runs her own bar, and you think you can fill your time within its walls, can learn to be whole in a new way behind its heavy door. Even if you can’t, you have to try something. You have to try something. There’s only so many ways to wake up at twilight and beg for death.
