The Quiet After Part II
The meadow becomes my place.
It isn’t the same meadow I feared as a girl, where names were pulled from bowls and lives were snuffed out like candles. It feels different now, though I don’t know if that’s because it has changed—or because I have. The fireflies help. Their light is fragile, temporary, but they keep returning year after year, no matter what happened here.
Sometimes, I sit with Peeta and trace the outlines of his drawings. He captures things I can’t say out loud: Prim’s smile, Rue’s song, Finnick’s grin. I envy him. His hands can shape memory into something that doesn’t fade. Mine can only release arrows into the sky.
I think about what we’re supposed to do now. The war is over, the Games are gone, but no one tells you how to live after. People rebuild. They trade, they laugh, they plant gardens. But what do you do when you’re no longer fighting to survive?
One morning, I see children chasing each other in the square. Their parents watch with smiles that don’t carry the same fear my mother’s once did. For a moment, I wonder what it would be like to have children of my own. The thought used to terrify me. It still does. But less than before.
I hear Gale’s name whispered sometimes. He visited not long ago, his face leaner, his eyes sharper. He didn’t stay. We didn’t ask him to. Our words were short, awkward, circling around all the things we couldn’t touch. He carries his own ghosts, and I carry mine. That’s enough.
Peeta plants a patch of primroses outside our house. He doesn’t tell me, but I know why. At first, it hurts to look at them, too sharp a reminder of what I lost. But slowly, I start to see them differently. Not as a symbol of death, but as proof of something delicate surviving anyway.
Sometimes I dream of fire. Sometimes I dream of Rue, her song filling the air. Sometimes I dream of nothing at all, and that’s the best gift of all.
I don’t know what tomorrow looks like. But standing in the meadow, with Peeta beside me and the fireflies refusing to burn out, I finally let myself imagine it.
