Post by Rated R on Nov 12, 2010 20:02:08 GMT -5
It’s the same dream every night. Every damn night for the past month. It always starts the same way, it always stays the same way and it always ends the same way. There’s no variation, there’s no change, there’s simply darkness.
Darkness that surrounds me, filling out the endless abyss of the dream. Flashes of lights occasionally fill the room, blinding me, creating some hallucinogenic construction that I don’t quite understand. Amongst all this, amongst the light and the darkness I sit there. No walls, no doors, nothing but me, the lights and the darkness.
Dreams shouldn’t be this lucid, I know that, but this... this seems like more than a dream.
Then the voices come, un-hear-able gibberish. Small words break through but by the end of the dream they’re forgotten in the haze, left behind in the darkness that fills the room.
It isn’t so much the words that antagonise me, words are common, they’re an everyday factor; they exist for a reason just as we do. We need them to communicate, to read and to prosper. No, it’s not the words that are spoken; it’s the voice that speak them.
Because this voice, this voice that seems to be trying to say something, that tries to break through to me, the voice that could change my world forever.
It is my voice.
And it’s trying to tell me something.
And that’s when I wake up.
< *** >
I’m in my bed, in my apartment, in the middle of the night. Of course I am, where else would I be?
Alexa, my two month pregnant girlfriend lies peacefully next to me. I say peacefully, she’ll be up by 6am with morning sickness. The joys of being a potential father is that you have to hold your girlfriends hair back while she throws up each and every morning.
I’ve never felt more like an adult.
The dream doesn’t shake me up too much anymore, the feeling I get after it however does. It’s the same feeling each and every time I wake up, it’s a feeling that I haven’t felt since I was a stupid, sex obsessed depressed teenager.
I feel like a piece of me is missing, lost.
And yes, I looked down the back of the couch and all I found was a dollar and some peanuts that weren’t suitable for human consumption.
But regardless, something is missing, and I can’t tell what it is, no matter how much I try, no matter how hard I think about it, it’s still missing and I’m no closer to realising what exactly ‘it’ is.
I sound like a whiny teenager, and I hate whiny teenagers. I mean, what do they have to cry about? Nothing, nothing at all. Well they will when it becomes legal to give annoying little teenagers a slap for being whiny.
I hope that time comes soon.
I slowly and silently push myself out of the bed, not wanting to wake Alexa. I don’t need a woman with pregnancy hormones being pissed off with me. Not after that plate incident.
Slipping on my jeans I think to the week ahead, facing Jason Jadoa, definitely not somebody to be taken lightly. But thinking of that match immediately sends me back to Braden Munroe. He beat me; he made me look like a fool, he took me out. And now he thinks he rules the show, that he’s the biggest thing around. There’d have been a time that I would have taken him out so quick and violently that Tabitha wouldn’t recognise his corpse when I was done.
There was a time...
But that’s not worth thinking about, not now. I’m going to be a father, I’ve got a family to look after, I can’t be that guy, I have to keep it back, repress the urges to kick Munroe’s teeth in, repress the desire to break Jason Jadoa’s legs.
I need to repress my natural instinct and think smart, think like a family man.
I walk carefully out of the bedroom, minding my step and... Oh god! Who put that bloody plug there?! I manage to hold in the obscenities as I pull the bloody plug out of my foot. This is what happens when you live with a woman.
I limp into the kitchen; I know the house well enough now not to have to switch the light on. Pouring myself a glass of water, I don’t drink alcohol or coffee anymore, my mind drifts back to the WFWF. Things are looking up there, we’ve got some of the best wrestlers around, but I’m struggling to see my future there, whatever I’ve lost it’s taken my killer instinct away from me. I’ve been able to make up for it with pure talent but it’s starting to show.
It’s starting to become a problem.
I have the skill and the talent to defeat Jason Jadoa, to defeat Braden Munroe, to defeat anybody, but it’s not enough. There’s some kind of internal conflict stopping me from using the best part of me in the ring.
My brain.
I’m a strategist, a tactician, it’s how I’ve always wrestled, but that was back then, now there’s something missing, something stopping me from being as ruthless as I used to be. I used to go into that ring and systematically tear apart anybody that stepped in there with me, but now I can’t do it, I step in the ring and I just wrestle.
And just being able to wrestle isn’t enough, not if you want to be the best.
It’s a problem that I need to solve, but therein lies the biggest difficulty because I can’t pinpoint exactly why I’ve changed, why I’m holding back. I can’t solve the problem without first knowing what’s causing it, and I don’t know the first place to start.
[/b]Darkness that surrounds me, filling out the endless abyss of the dream. Flashes of lights occasionally fill the room, blinding me, creating some hallucinogenic construction that I don’t quite understand. Amongst all this, amongst the light and the darkness I sit there. No walls, no doors, nothing but me, the lights and the darkness.
Dreams shouldn’t be this lucid, I know that, but this... this seems like more than a dream.
Then the voices come, un-hear-able gibberish. Small words break through but by the end of the dream they’re forgotten in the haze, left behind in the darkness that fills the room.
It isn’t so much the words that antagonise me, words are common, they’re an everyday factor; they exist for a reason just as we do. We need them to communicate, to read and to prosper. No, it’s not the words that are spoken; it’s the voice that speak them.
Because this voice, this voice that seems to be trying to say something, that tries to break through to me, the voice that could change my world forever.
It is my voice.
And it’s trying to tell me something.
And that’s when I wake up.
< *** >
I’m in my bed, in my apartment, in the middle of the night. Of course I am, where else would I be?
Alexa, my two month pregnant girlfriend lies peacefully next to me. I say peacefully, she’ll be up by 6am with morning sickness. The joys of being a potential father is that you have to hold your girlfriends hair back while she throws up each and every morning.
I’ve never felt more like an adult.
The dream doesn’t shake me up too much anymore, the feeling I get after it however does. It’s the same feeling each and every time I wake up, it’s a feeling that I haven’t felt since I was a stupid, sex obsessed depressed teenager.
I feel like a piece of me is missing, lost.
And yes, I looked down the back of the couch and all I found was a dollar and some peanuts that weren’t suitable for human consumption.
But regardless, something is missing, and I can’t tell what it is, no matter how much I try, no matter how hard I think about it, it’s still missing and I’m no closer to realising what exactly ‘it’ is.
I sound like a whiny teenager, and I hate whiny teenagers. I mean, what do they have to cry about? Nothing, nothing at all. Well they will when it becomes legal to give annoying little teenagers a slap for being whiny.
I hope that time comes soon.
I slowly and silently push myself out of the bed, not wanting to wake Alexa. I don’t need a woman with pregnancy hormones being pissed off with me. Not after that plate incident.
Slipping on my jeans I think to the week ahead, facing Jason Jadoa, definitely not somebody to be taken lightly. But thinking of that match immediately sends me back to Braden Munroe. He beat me; he made me look like a fool, he took me out. And now he thinks he rules the show, that he’s the biggest thing around. There’d have been a time that I would have taken him out so quick and violently that Tabitha wouldn’t recognise his corpse when I was done.
There was a time...
But that’s not worth thinking about, not now. I’m going to be a father, I’ve got a family to look after, I can’t be that guy, I have to keep it back, repress the urges to kick Munroe’s teeth in, repress the desire to break Jason Jadoa’s legs.
I need to repress my natural instinct and think smart, think like a family man.
I walk carefully out of the bedroom, minding my step and... Oh god! Who put that bloody plug there?! I manage to hold in the obscenities as I pull the bloody plug out of my foot. This is what happens when you live with a woman.
I limp into the kitchen; I know the house well enough now not to have to switch the light on. Pouring myself a glass of water, I don’t drink alcohol or coffee anymore, my mind drifts back to the WFWF. Things are looking up there, we’ve got some of the best wrestlers around, but I’m struggling to see my future there, whatever I’ve lost it’s taken my killer instinct away from me. I’ve been able to make up for it with pure talent but it’s starting to show.
It’s starting to become a problem.
I have the skill and the talent to defeat Jason Jadoa, to defeat Braden Munroe, to defeat anybody, but it’s not enough. There’s some kind of internal conflict stopping me from using the best part of me in the ring.
My brain.
I’m a strategist, a tactician, it’s how I’ve always wrestled, but that was back then, now there’s something missing, something stopping me from being as ruthless as I used to be. I used to go into that ring and systematically tear apart anybody that stepped in there with me, but now I can’t do it, I step in the ring and I just wrestle.
And just being able to wrestle isn’t enough, not if you want to be the best.
It’s a problem that I need to solve, but therein lies the biggest difficulty because I can’t pinpoint exactly why I’ve changed, why I’m holding back. I can’t solve the problem without first knowing what’s causing it, and I don’t know the first place to start.
Alexa[/b]: Couldn’t sleep?
I turn around from my seat. Alexa is standing in the doorway, looking as radiant as ever. I didn’t even hear her come in, I’m definitely slipping.
Trace: Just getting some water.
Alexa: Don’t lie.
She can always tell when I’m lying, I don’t know how because I think I’ve got a pretty good poker face, but she can call my bluff every time and see straight through every word I say. It’s the exact reason why I’ll never have an affair.
Okay, so maybe it’s because I love her, but that’s too soppy, right?
Alexa: It’s not the first time Trace, you’ve done this every night for a month.
Trace: You knew?
She smiles at me, a smile that says everything, that tells me of course she knew, that says she knows everything. God, I never knew a smile could be so arrogant.
Alexa: So what’s the problem?
Trace: Nothing... well something, but nothing I can really explain.
Alexa: You can try.
Trace: You know I don’t do this emotional stuff Lex, it’s just not me.
Alexa: Well being a father wasn’t you this time two years ago but look at you now. People change Trace, you aren’t that person anymore.
When you come to a realisation it’s like some magical bullet has just ripped straight through your brain. Suddenly, it all clicked into place, the reason why I’d suddenly lost my killer instinct, the reason I felt like something was missing from my life. In truth, everything I could want is here, but that didn’t mean I was complete. All it meant was that I’d been trying too hard to forget everything I was.
I’ve been trying so hard to be somebody different, to become the person that would make a good father and while that was perfect for my everyday life, it doesn’t suit a wrestler. I’ve always lived with both worlds as one, the person I was inside the ring was the person I was outside. So trying to change who I was outside the ring meant I lost the viciousness that made me great inside it.
It was like some magical switch had just flicked on, something in my brain suddenly saw where I was going wrong and everything started clicking. I can’t be the person inside the ring that I am outside; it just doesn’t work because if I do, I lose everything that makes me great. I need to separate them, just because I try to be a good person outside the ring doesn’t mean I need to take any crap from punks like Braden Munroe when I’m working. In fact, it means completely the opposite, it means that when I step into that ring I can unleash all the aggression, all the anger, all the emotion on whoever I’m facing.
It means that when I step in the ring with Jason Jadoa he is not going to know who he’s facing, because it won’t be the same Trace Demon that has stepped in the ring over the past couple of months. It’s going to be a Trace Demon who’s killer instinct has switched back on, a Trace Demon who is ready to cripple any opponent if that’s what it takes to win.[/b]
Trace: Thank you Alexa.
I stand up and kiss her, I take her hand in mine and lead her back towards the bedroom. She looks confused and I guess that’s not surprising, she didn’t just have an epiphany. Not like yours truly.
Alexa: So wait, what was the problem?
Trace: I was, or at least Trace Demon the wrestler was.
Alexa: And what exactly does that mean?
Trace: It means the WFWF is in some serious trouble.
I close the bedroom door behind us, ready to fight another day, ready to win.
I sleep peacefully that night, for the first time in a month.
< *** >
The phone rings... once... twice... three times.
?: Hello?
Trace Demon: I didn’t think you were going to answer.
?: Well it took some deliberating, we’re not exactly on good terms.
Trace Demon: That’s what I’m ringing to talk about, I want a truce, I want your help.
?: With what Trace?
Trace Demon: With a war.
Silence.
?: A war on who?
Trace Demon: On the entire damn company...[/center]
