the ecstasy of visions/delusions against a breaking sun.

i. with heartbeats like fluttering wings.

In one of her more lucid moments, she realizes that life in Panem is more than being stupidly scheherazade, losing count of the nights, (as the Capitol leads you to believe.) more than looking for peace, (after concluding that it's only found six feet under) more that surviving and surviving over and over again, and, yeah, may very well be just breathing. And breathing can be a bitch.

,

glass lungs cannot

breathe anything but anesthetic.

,

The morphling helps her breathe. It's a quick splash of ice in her burning veins, cold and lingering, as her heart beats like reckless hands.

,

it's a frostbite and it has drowned

the world out, silencing unvoiced sorrows.

,

Late nights see her clawing her bedsheets and grasping for air, before stumbling, reaching for the syringe, then collapsing in drug-induced apathy. It was an apathy directed only at the world outside her head— after the morphine she dreams to a kaleidoscope of colours and abstract static. In her head, apathy is a word not heard of. she's so fucking angry inside her head.

,

her thoughts are an endless litany of dreams,

the ecstasy of visions/delusions against a breaking sun.

,

When she is lucid her mind is a decline from beauty to a simpler form. she no longer sees the world in colours but in shades of grey.

(She can't stand grey— it's so boring and lifeless. So she takes morphling like it's alcohol, downs it like an anesthetic and is positive that her despair will end tomorrow. It's self-numbing, dragging her out of clarity—

,

she has an inability to accept

anything contrary to herself.

and these days

she can't separate the colours and herself.)

.

ii. clarity is a sickness that blinds you.

,

the sun never sets. but that's a lie, that's

a dirty rotten lie.

don't you believe it's foolish to believe in

immortality?

,

If there's one thing she hates more than anything else about District Thirteen is that it's so grey. It's hard to see the world in colours if the world is colourless. And, of course, there's the added bonus of being cut off the morphling.

,

breathing is life,

but. . . she needs anesthetic to breathe.

,

Time passes by in unconnected moments, long and drawn out. She hasn't been able to breathe for an immeasurable infinity. Late nights in the Capitol had nothing on this agony.

So she starts to steal morphling from other patients, a little anesthetic for her heaving lungs.

,

she isn't bleeding herself dry anymore,

but she's still

pulling herself to pieces.

,

District Thirteen has settled into a life of monotonous repetition, a goddamn drill camp with no variation in the natural sequencing. There is no adaptation here, and she cannot even imagine color while in such a lifeless place. Everything blends together in perfect clarity, and mixes into an indistinguishable blur of forgots.

,

And when they finally let her go outside,

she gives a long-needed gasp

for air.

.

-fin.