Perspectives

Her Carer

I don't remember a time without hunger, Reapings, poverty and division. But I'm of the few that actually know that such a time existed. Not only was my grandpa born before the Dark Days, by his Papa before him had survived the Greatest War, and had lived to see a whole nation being destroyed and the aftermath that led to the miserable life we have today.

The details are hazy. At fifty, I am not young, and I've never been very smart. I didn't like school much. I don't know how to read and all I know in life I learnt from the little stand at The Hob that I took over from my poor Mama, and which somehow keeps the most desperate of us alive in times of need.

Grandpa used to tell me that his Papa lived in a time where people could speak and read and learn and travel and communicate freely. In those days people did not only have telephones, but they had little flat boxes and devices which they could carry around and use to communicate and look for answers to questions they could ask without getting into trouble. There were flying machines, different from hovercrafts, which used to take you to other lands, and people used to choose to fly just for their own amusement. Sometimes I think that he was just playing around with me, filling me with stories that just cannot possibly be true. But from what we see on television, the Capitol does have things that are more fantastical than flat phone devices, so maybe...there were times where such things did exist even in the Districts?

Mind you, the life Grandpa spoke about was different. He says that his Papa told him about other lands besides Panem, or North America, as it used to be called before. There used to be whole vast lands where people all looked like that boy who died from District 11 last year, and others where people look just like the girl from District 3 who won that edition with the snakes. Apparently great-Grandpapa lived in a time where people were not compared for their looks to Tributes from specific Districts, because Tributes did not exist, and neither did the segregation of the Districts.

As a child I was told that people spoke other tongues too, but I don't think that can be true. What is the point of having special phones if then you don't understand each other?

Not that it matters anymore. The Greatest War came, I don't really remember why, but I think it was because people worshipped different gods, or one god with a different name, and they started killing each other because of it. It seems to me to be a rather silly reason to start a war, especially since it led to bombs being dropped that caused the sea to swallow up land and kill almost everyone, and for the survivors to turn against each other, leading to the creation of Panem. But who am I to question? Perhaps if you have everything, you choose to start wars for silly reasons. President Snow does not allow us to think of gods and other such things. Maybe he is right. I never really question what President Snow decides.

I don't know whether there is anything outside of Panem anymore. After the Greatest War ended, communication stopped, and Grandpa always thought that everyone in those faraway lands died and that only we managed to survive. But he didn't know for sure. He was not allowed to ask. I used to wonder as a kid whether people existed outside of Panem, but the older I grew, the less I cared. Life outside of Panem started to matter less and less when the world around me kept growing smaller and smaller. I survived the Reaping in a midst of indifference and apathy, not wanting to die in the arena, but not particularly keen on the life I was leading in the Seam either. I married at eighteen, had a daughter two years later. My husband died in the mines, as I was always taught to expect him to do. The Seam boys who survive the Reaping still have to face their own daily arena. The Seam girls learn to grieve with detachment when they lose their father or their first brother. By the time they lose their husband, they'd be mixing their sobs with foraging for food and work.

And this was my life, with a world shrinking more and more until only my daughter remained to give it importance. The fates were evil though, and she died at childbirth, leaving me to deal with heartbreak that I was never prepared for. My son-in-law remarried soon after, choosing to leave me with a granddaughter who is the most gentle and most beautiful girl in the world, and who will never know sorrow because in her simple, happy mind, she can see no bad in life.