Flooding Panem: The Hunger Games

Interlude

Acting used to be a worldwide profession. Now it's only considered to be one in the Capitol, where actors have the chance to become tributes from past Games.  

I've spent so much of my life acting, and to many, I've been very good at it. Too good at it. As a thirteen year old girl, I was scared. I wasn't ready to defy anyone. So when I was offered a way out of war, I took it. I didn't think of the consequences my actions would have. I let them chisel me, mould me into someone they could explain so that I wouldn't be someone who'd defeated them. And because I let them do this, there are only twenty three other people in this world who could truly understand me if they tried. Half of them won't. Two of them do. The rest are trying to sort themselves out.

Thinking back to the days even before my transformation began, I can't imagine anything worse than being an actor. All I wanted to do was cry, or hug someone, or scream at the world until it was washed away. As a normal teenage girl, I should have been able to do that.  

But I was an actor by compulsion, and actors can't display their emotions. They have to read out the lines that they've been given and perform them with the emotion set by the director. And when they're told to play the villain, they can't cry when the hero dies. They have to look on and laugh. If not, they're fired.

Fired. 

But at some point, people forget that they're watching a show. And when that happens, you can be fired as many times as you like, but no one will ever see you as anyone except that person on the screen. Unless, of course, you put on an even bigger spectacle. But then who directs that?

One thing is always clear- the actor never wins.