𝐒𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐊𝐒 ❦ The Hunger Games

twenty-three

☆ CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE! ☆
023. see you later

|| KIDS IN THE DARK ||
❝They left us alone,
the kids in the
dark, to burn out
forever, or light up
a spark❞

➳➳

LOVE IS SUCH a strange word.

It was used so frequently; by the time I was six years old I had heard it a thousand times and yet I never got an overwhelming feeling that the person saying it knew what it meant. It was a word that could of been leathal, it could of been used as a dagger to shatter the heart in seconds, or it could of been moulded into super glue to somehow put it back together. People used love flippantly. They made it disposable and useless- they made the very heart of it meaningless by it's overuse so that nobody actually remembered what real love felt like as they spat out petty meanings that they thought fit the bill.

To me that was a crime- love deserved so much better.

They had taken a word, one that was so precious and fragile in it's meaning, and turned it into a robust and basic phrase for general consumption. In doing so they forgot how intense it could be, or how fearful it could make the people that recieved it when they didn't know any better than to run away. Worst of all, they made it so that I didn't know what actual live felt like- they made me blind to it.

If it was right in front of me- weaved into the souls of everyone I touched- I still wouldn't see it.

And that meant that I never truly let myself believe that I could be loved, or that I could love somebody in return when I could never compare it to the affection I felt for my closest friends. It was impossible to decide which one it could be; nobody could tell me or write a long book I could read to explain exactly what would happen when I met the person that meant the most to me.

Without it, and with the blatant murder of the word love, I decided that I would never feel it before I was killed in the Hunger Games.

As we walked up to the tree that was supposed to destroy all other competition, I finally realised that was ok. Why? Because you can't miss something you had never felt and you certainly cannot wish for something that you weren't even sure existed.

Coming from me, it was hard to believe it when I said something didn't exist.

I would of asked someone like Beetee if I knew that he would give me a straight answer, or maybe even Peeta Mellark who would explain exactly why I was so terribly wrong while staring at the Girl on Fire until Johanna was sick. I wouldn't of asked Finnick- lord knew that he had lost faith in the ability to love long before I even considered the emotion again.