The Hunger Games

By D Sharon Pruitt [CC-BY-2.0
(www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

It hurts. The movie - The Hunger Games - if you watch it, it hurts. I've been home for about an hour, and I'm still zombie-like, stunned, trying to find my numb place. I suspect Tristan feels it too. We've spoken only a handful of sentences since we left the theater. Something dark, palpable, heavy. It weighs on us, that which words cannot transmute to air. I shy from the cliff of tears, the inevitable tumble of pain.

My mother tells me I just feel things more strongly than others do. I can't speak for others; thus I can't know if there is truth to the latter. But as for the former, it is one of the deepest truths I know about myself.

I. Feel things. More. Strongly. 

It is who I am. A blessing and a curse. And so the near-numbness that the tears behind my eyes are burning away is all that's protecting me from searing pain. My heart feels truth even more strongly than my brain can know it.

And the pain I feel doesn't end with the movie. Because art is allegory. Because their fiction is our reality. Because we are the garish crowds who watch as others die and then click off the screen, and we are they who resume our living unscathed. I am left with guilt, with powerlessness, with fear. And an unlikely 90s song playing on repeat in my head:

And Balancing the Scales, KFTC's newsletter, from today's mail lying on my kitchen table, as if on cue, as it and they so often reach me, just when I need them most. Whenever I despair, they and you are my hope. And hope, as the Games tells us, is the only thing stronger than fear. We must feel. We must act. And we must not let the spark go out.