que no salga la luna | ximena.

[🌱 kaitlin.]

X I M E N A.

eighteen.
little rebel girl.
district nine.

[🌱 kaitlin.]

You cannot remember your family as a unit.

You don't know how to be sad about that. How do you miss something that you don't remember?

Your mother is only alive in the stories that your father used to write for you under the stars, and the worn-out old polaroid photo that you have of the two of them. He told you that it was from the day that the they got married. No one ever explained to you why it was that you were on the front lines with your father and your two brothers were back home with your mother, but they were there and you were running through the trees learning how to hold a gun before you learned how to spell your name and somehow that made sense to everyone involved, so you don't question it that much these days.

Home for them was working in the factories making weapons being sold to you and your dad's enemies, and home for you was a stamped out campfire in the woods, running from rebel camp to rebel camp as you fought for the entire nation's fucking lives.

When you got home after the war and found out that she'd been butchered in the street when Keepers found out that she worked in one of the factories secretly selling weapons to the rebellion, well, there was a whole lot there that probably should have made you feel something but mostly you were tired of trying to remember her face, tired of trying to remember the supposedly soft tone of her voice as she told you bedtime stories before you went with your father to the war.

She wasn't your home.

You'd sooner mourn the end of the war than you'd mourn for her.

[🌱 kaitlin.]

Your brothers are another story.

You have never been one for metaphors, but the universe carves you out your very own pair of stars when you come home, fifteen years old and already world-weary and war-torn, so you teach yourself how to love again for their sake.

You're glad when you discover they deserve it.

[🌱 kaitlin.]

"Ya no hay nadie más," Angel says, tucking one of your curls behind your ear as you settle in for the night on his couch. "No tenemos a nadie más."

You don't reply at first. You know he's wrong.

If there's anything that you learned from the war, it's this: "there's always someone willing to rebel, ."

[🌱 kaitlin.]

Girl with pinned wings, the Adroxis kid teaches you how to fly again.

[🌱 kaitlin.]

You — welcome back to the maze.

Funny, you think, you don't really remember how you got here, only know that through a series of twists and turns, it felt like between one breath and the next, you were somewhere you didn't recognize. A place that you had never been before. A girl turned—something else.

Are you lost?

Too late, you figure that surely the answer must be yes, that somewhere between grief and relearning how to breathe, you stepped foot into the maze and gave yourself over to the only comforts you have ever been able to admit to loving. Violence, and the warmth of its embrace. Being lost, you feel for the first time that you hold the truth in your very own palms. Being lost means that you question everything and you question nothing, that you can follow orders and you can disobey them and spoiler alert: none of it is going to fucking matter because no matter what you do, every step brings you closer and closer towards oblivion, and you'll shake a little less every inch.

The maze opened its arms to you, and somewhere along the way, you realize it knows more about you now than you know about yourself.

Something about that makes you trust the process.

What else is there to do, after all? Be afraid? Cry and kick and scream just to make yourself feel alive? To make yourself feel powerful? No, giving in was the first thing that ever made you feel like you had any sort of power.

First, it was your captain, pressing your father's gun into your childlike hands, forcing you through the mouth of the maze. She ripened your heart herself, made sure that you knew being lost, being alone, meant that you held the advantage. She's dead now, took a bullet between her eyes in the last few weeks before the surrender, but you're alive and the Adroxis boy offered you another kind of oblivion and his merry band of misfits never seemed to mind the hulking beast with dark eyes and curled horns that lived in your heart.

Are you lost?

You hope so.

[🌱 kaitlin.]

Your father is dead and your mother is dead and one of your brothers hates you for letting your father die as much as he loves you and the other one offers you a place on his couch and stares at you day in and day out with sad eyes in a sad apartment perfect for a sad life and—

You love them both. You do.

Sometimes you wonder, if it had been trained into you to feel pity, would you be able to? 

You're not sure. 

Each of your curved bones was ground down into a collection of straight lines. You have no room in you for fragility.

[🌱 kaitlin.]

"Do you want me to say I'm sorry?"

"Quiero que lo lamentes."

"Look, I'd say I'm sor—"

"Pero no lo eres, ¿verdad?"

"I'm sorry you're hurting."

"No es lo mismo."