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i. Jeanette Winterson, All I Know About Gertrude Stein ii. Mitski, A Pearl iii. Unknown iv. Mitski, First Love/Late Spring v. Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of my Nonexistence vi. Ana Teresa Barboza, Blood and Guts
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SHE: You can't save someone who does not want to be saved.
HE: I can try.
Kenna Greaves was fifteen when she died. No, not died. Murdered. Murdered by a system that would never favour people like her, by men that had never tasted their own blood, by a crowd that craved to see death and pain as long as it wasn't theirs.
Kenna was fifteen when she was Reaped. She was fifteen when she was forced into the slaughterhouse, the Arena with a knife, a wish and a promise. We'll see each other again. She was fifteen when she strangled, stabbed, slashed, decapitated, choked and poisoned. She was fifteen when she was forced to kill her best friend, watching as the light faded from her bright blue eyes. She was fifteen when she won the 68th Hunger Games, the crowd's applause just barely drowning out the voices in her head and the screams of the people that were sacrificed so she could survive.
So the vicious cycle of violence continued and the murdered became the murderer. Did anyone really win? Did anyone really survive?
Kenna was sixteen when she became the Capitol's sweetheart. She was sixteen when she attended all those fancy meals with the people that murdered her in the first place. She was sixteen when she was advised to hold a boy's hand and kiss him in front of the cameras so Panem could have something to talk about━the perfect couple between two broken Victors whose debts could never be paid.
She is seventeen when her and Finnick Odair "break up" because their relationship diminished their desirability. She is seventeen when she's forced to be the Capitol's doll, in every way that counted.
People love to try and fix a broken toy. But someone like her could never be fixed.
But Kenna is no longer a toy, no longer a doll, no longer a sweetheart. For the last two years of her life, she has been isolated and locked inside her house as if she is trying to suffocate herself to go peacefully━even if she thinks she doesn't truly deserve peace, not even in her last moments. Not even her mentor and the only person she loves in the world can save her from the waves that keep her underwater, from the bottles of whiskey smashed against walls and the drugs that have been offered to her.
