His Mother

                                    

                                          


                          
I know exactly when the Darkness took over. I am able to relive the precise moment it happened, the words that triggered it and the touch that pushed me towards it. My breath still catches at the sight of the restrained tears in those blue eyes that I had equally loved and resented for the past seventeen years.
                          
I can also still hear the wail that accompanied me to that welcoming shroud of apathy. It was loud, painful, desperate. And it had come from me.
                          
...
                          
Even before the Darkness came, I cannot remember a time when my life wasn't dim or bleak at best. I was born as a consequence of the foolishness of my mother, the fifteen year old daughter of the Town's main carpenter, and the careless lust of a young peacekeeper from District 5. He had been posted in our district for duty, and was quickly and quietly dispatched to some place unknown as soon as news of my mother's pregnancy spread around the streets and reached his superiors. My mother died giving birth to me, and my grandparents, shamed, broken and angry, did nothing to make me forget that I was born from a union that should have never happened. Every day I was made to remember that my green eyes and auburn hair, traits which strictly belong to District 5, would remain with me as an indelible mark of my parent's mistake.
                          
In the clear division created in Panem, where entire generations were kept geographically divided from each other and securely penned inside their districts, there was no place for red locks and green feline eyes in a crowd neatly categorised in two. I could never fit in the close-knit group of the Seamers, who were united in their misery, and the Merchants scorned me for being providing the proof that my mother had erred in mixing outside the district. I grew up scared, suspicious, miserable and taciturn, but as my cursed luck would have it, I fell in love with the boy who encapsulated all that I should have been, and wasn't.
                          
I loved Wheaton Mellark. Hopelessly, desperately and blindly. He was the pride of the district with his blonde, sun kissed waves which fell over his sharp blue eyes. He was kind and generous, good at school and sports, and a doting son who took over the family business when his father died when he was nineteen. He didn't care that I looked different, and that I could never look at anyone in the eye because of my shame at their colour. He smiled at me when I visited his bakery far too often and on my sixteenth birthday he told me that I should learn the difference between being different and being special. One my seventeenth birthday he said that he thought I had pretty eyes but that he couldn't see them well enough since I insisted on keeping them hidden. After that comment, I never broke eye contact with him, not ever. I stared at him and smiled even when his fiancée May, the apothecary's daughter, was helping him out at the Bakery behind the counter.
                          
Wheaton was engaged of course. And he was engaged to the most beautiful girl in Town. How he could he not have been? He had been informally promised to May ever since we were out of middle school. It was all decided by their families and every survived reaping brought them closer to their wedding day. But I never broke eye contact with him. Not ever.
                          
The night when May broke things off with him, and was banished to the Seam by her parents I went to him. We cried together and he thanked me for being his friend. He took me willingly to his bed less than a month later. I don't know what I was doing at the time. Comforting him? Taking advantage of his heartbreak? Loving him? Ruining his chance of happiness with someone whom he could learn to love? I relived that night in my mind many years after as I lay alone in our bed, but I was never strong enough to find an answer. All I know is that he would bury his impossibly beautiful face in my neck, playing with my red hair, panting that I was special, saying that he loved me.
                          
I never believed him.
                          
I married Wheaton, and on the day of my Toasting my grandfather reminded me that I will always be the second choice, and that I should be thankful to the apothecary's daughter for leaving him for the rest of my life. I blocked his voice and vowed my loyalty to the baker. Wheaton never mentioned May, and she had the grace never to show herself at the bakery and for the first few years of our marriage, I was happy. It was a subdued, restrained, and disbelieving kind of happiness, but never had my life been brighter. I had not found love in the family I was born into, but I was determined to find it in the family that I would create for myself.