IN WHICH,
The boy who frequents your father's workshop carves a place for himself in your heart.
'He's looking at you. He's looking at you as if you're his whole world. If anyone could see him right now, they would immediately understand one thing:...
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The concept of time was strange. During blissful moments, the thought of it would escape you. First, you would lose all sense of it and later wonder where all the time went. With Treech, time never mattered to you. The days would fly past you and the only thing that would stop you was the setting of the sun. It brought out a childish side of you if you were being honest. In the past, you would rise and play as soon as the sun rose, falling into a deep slumber when it said farewell to the world.
Now, it was vastly different. The hours of the day sluggishly dragged on. In your hands was a piece you had been working on for the past few hours, filled with indents and finer details. Although you should have been used to this monotonous routine after having stuck to it for several years, you can't help but feel how slow-paced it seemed.
If you were your past self, this would have been the highlight of your day. Hours of your day spent in solitude refining or preparing another wooden project for the Capitol. Just devoting your time to do what you loved most - immersing yourself in your craft.
Only recently did you begin to think of how dull it seemed to an outside perspective. How colourless your world was before the boy who radiated sunshine walked into your father's workshop. How the canvas of colours glittering in his eyes instantly drew your attention away from what you were working on. He was almost like an inspiration of some sort to you. Your muse. The primrose growing in the winter months. Your lumberjack.
A small part of you had secretly hoped for the bell of the workshop to ring, signifying a customer entered. You would then look up and he would be standing there, with that same stupid grin he always had when he looked at you. Treech would greet you with a primrose and whisk you away from the confines of the building. Temporarily, you and him would lose yourselves in another world. A world in which you two were just regular teenagers, not having to worry about nonsensical things such as the Games.
You snapped yourself out of your daydream. There you were again, hoping he would come back home safe and sound. The first day since he had been taken away was so peculiar. Even after a few days of the same repetitive routine, you never did adjust to the atmosphere of the workshop without him there.
Truthfully, the only thing keeping you sane at the present moment was his hat. It felt like he had left a piece of himself at home, and that in itself was enough to console you for a while.
However, when you would lie awake at night, the day of the Reaping would replay in your head. You still remembered his hold on you before he was pushed into the train. You could still picture the grin on his face as he tried to reassure you he would be okay. As you recalled the day of the Reaping, tears would spill out of your eyes and dark thoughts would overwhelm your mind. It wasn't fair. None of this was fair. The worst kind of torture is to wait patiently for something you know you can't even change. It rendered you useless, having no power to change any of this. He had woven his way into your life and you couldn't even make a difference in his fate.
