Writer Games | Masquerade of Martyrs & Family Ties

Task Eight: The Rebirth /F - Dove Evans [6]

Dear Mother,

I am seventeen today.   Most seventeen year olds in the district have a cause, however minimal,  for both celebration and despair: they now have only two years left of  the reaping, but one more entry in the ball.  But I have a different  cause for despair altogether.

On this day, I can no longer deny that I have spent more my life as a victor than not.

I've tried to do good  things with the lot I've been given. Sparrow came up with the idea of  opening the house to the poorer side of town.  The cripples, the  orphans, and the elderly, to be specific, and anyone else with nowhere  else to go.  We're going to add an extension onto the house in the  spring.

This makes it sound like  there was something good to come out of the Games.  There's not.  At  least, not yet.  The other victors call me optimistic, but I know that  much.  I have known that much, since before that day when they put a  crown on my head and proclaimed me victor.

To this day I still  wonder what you would have said or did if you had been there.  If you  had seen me, a child of eight years old, crowned victor of the Hunger  Games.  You would have wept, I know.  But would you have wept with joy  for my life, or wept with sorrow for the burdens I was to bear from then  on?

Try as I might, I cannot  come to any firm conclusion on how you would have reacted.  There is  only one thing I am certain of: When I refused the operation, when I  chose to stay crippled with my own legs forever rather than take their  phony fakes won with blood and death, you would have been pride of me.   Father has told me so.

I try to forgive him.  I  swear I do.  Every time I look into his eyes, I remember you and I try  to be a family with him again.  But it's hard.  Every time I look at  him, he and I exchange a look and I know we're both thinking of the  blood he carries on his hands.  Talon's, and, if the Games had gone  differently, he would carry mine too.

Sometimes I want to  blame Grandmother for it all.  Since you weren't there, I suppose I must  tell you that she died long ago, taken out by a simple disease in the  time it took me to get from the Capitol to the districts.  I never had  to see her again, one of the ones that condemned my childhood to  destruction.  In a lot of ways, I think that is a good thing.  But in my  darkest of hearts, I wish I could have looked into the eyes of the  woman who sent me to the slaughter.  I wish I could have haunted her  dreams as Hettie haunts mine.

Have you met Hettie?   She's in the same place you are, I'd think.  I called her Mom once,  right before she died.  Do not take offense at this, Mother.  She  reminded me of what I'd always imagined you would be like.  The next  time you see her, give her my thanks for protecting me as she did.  She  was the one to hold me together after Talon died, until she passed away  as well.

I learned a lesson from  those memories, a lesson that holds me together today while so many  others in my position have long since succumbed to drug or drink.  When  you love someone, they will leave you for the next life.  Someone new  will come along and capture your love anew, until they, too, leave you  for what comes next.  Many victors have learned this.

But what I figured out  is simply: there will always be another.  The cycle of dying never ends,  but neither does the cycle of loving.  There will always be another to  love.  First I had you, then Talon, then Hettie.  Now I have Sparrow and  Finch.

They'll die too  eventually, unless I die first.  That doesn't upset me as much as it  used to.  You see, a heart can only break so much before it either  breaks forever, or it learns to bend.  My heart learned to bend.

In a few weeks, it'll be  the fifteenth anniversary of your death.  Once it was the most mournful  day of the year.  Now it's just another anniversary of another death,  and it's not even the hardest.  I miss you, Mother, but I can barely  remember you.  It's Talon and Hettie's deaths that are the hardest.   Their deaths are the ones that leave me waking up with nightmares and  sobbing at gravestones once a year.

And yet, rather than  writing to Talon or Hettie on this day, I find myself writing to you.   Why?  Why do I write to a woman I can't even remember instead of to my  beloved brother, or the woman who cared for me as if I were her own?

I think I know why.  You  see, writing to you is a bit like writing to myself.  I can't remember  you, no more than I can remember the girl I used to be.

Your Crippled Daughter (In More Ways than One),

Dove Evans