Chapter Text
The townsfolk heard your story and decided that what you’d gone through wasn’t so bad. Each of them had been through worse and come out better, and they told you exactly how, each raising their voices over the others. The chorus drowned out the churning in your gut. It was in the past, anyway, concluded the townsfolk—but their stories were in the past, too, and by unspoken agreement, theirs deserved to be told and re-told. Yours must never be told again.
So, you continued to tell that story without meaning to: by the constant complaints about unrelated events that might not be all that bad, or in outbursts that made no sense when you recall it after the energy to burst-out had been spent. Living becomes a pain—ulcers, headaches, the world so sharpened by terror that it slices your heart into petals—and you don’t even really know why anymore. Those who care advise you to get used to it: this is life. Those who don’t care admonish you to contain the uncontainable, and repeat: it wasn’t that bad; it wasn’t even real.
You’ve said too much, in the wrong way, or left out some crucial detail that would have moved them to respond differently. You can’t take your story back and keep it safe from their scorn and ridicule. You can’t stop the epilogue from seeping out of you like sweat and tears, but nobody else will have it.
If anyone understood, they didn’t (shouldn’t) show it. The townsfolk made an example of you.
And even that isn’t so bad. If they shunned you into poverty, or joined forces to hurt you badly enough to end this misery—then at least you could wonder if you hit a nerve and they all just didn’t want to admit that your story was true. Instead, they gave you hope of belonging in this world again. You took that hope, despite yourself.
One day, you walked the path out of town toward the surf and sunset. It never made anything better, but it looked like the thing to do to make things better (because that was what mattered.)
As you walked along the beach, the sands turned into rock, and you looked behind you and found no sands at all. Terror without cause had done its worst: though you might have cause for terror now, your body’s response felt more like thoughtless routine, and the accompanying emotion isn’t really terror at all but numbness. The shoreline took a sharp turn that you didn’t remember being there in all the time that you’d walked this stretch. There was a tower on that point, covered in vines and hardly crumbled. It must have been ancient, but you knew that it wasn’t here yesterday. It was tall enough that you would have seen it from the edge of town, or even (you phant’sy) from outer space.
Maybe the presence of the tower means that going back to town isn’t the only option anymore. It never was your only option, but you had hope, and everybody suffered for it—you most of all, as they had ways to recover, but it was suffering all the same.
Your decision to stay in this tower should have been a decision to live in it.
If you enter this tower, you’re going to die.
*
There wasn’t enough of you left to do so on purpose yet, but your true downfall began once you made the attempt. You stepped on the sill of the highest window of this tower and squinted against the wind and rain. They blurred together, the sea and sky; they blurred the jagged rocks below.
You planned to jump. Then again, you planned to walk down the sandy beach until the sun sank behind the ocean, and then return to town. You had also planned to leave the life-ruining-but-otherwise-not-that-bad event in the past.
What stops you this time? You can take another step into the sky, it stands to reason that you have enough reason to—and not enough reason not to. You haven’t been reasonable for a long while. Maybe this can be like your outbursts, only this time you only hurt yourself. Maybe you can think of it as flying. Maybe you’re just so tired that you’ll fall so finally asleep. You wonder if you can resort to slipping and falling, making an accident aligned with intent.
You’re not afraid of pain or death. I believe you. You have nothing to live for. I won’t convince you otherwise.
But you don’t do it.
Next time, maybe—ah, next time, certainly. Between now and then, you shall step down from the window. You shall move past the low-hanging and unlit chandelier, past the giant hourglass with all the sand collected at the bottom, past the shelves of books with blank pages and the vials of ink, and down the spiral staircase. The storm will calm. You shall walk the beach, and find bobbing in the shallows the body of a woman who should have lived—and there you’ll stand, on dry land, living when you should have died.
What will you do, Katniss? What will you do then?
Wade into the waters. Wrap your arms around her body and bring her head up over the waves. Breathe a sigh of relief when she gasps, coughs, vomits—even all over you. She’s alive.