Post by Kyle Shane on Jan 15, 2018 20:00:11 GMT -5
"So you feel like there's a part of you that's missing?"
It's easy for Krista to ask that. She doesn't see the chunk taken out of me right now, that aches like a phantom limb.
I've been mostly haunting the apartment like a ghost since I left the arena the night of the 10th. I've gone out in public, sure. When I went to take the kid to school. Johnny sensed it, I think. He looked at me in that worried way kids gauge their parents sometimes. They have no baseline to compare how they should feel with the spells they're seeing. Shit, kid, neither do I. As I had walked him in the doors and trudged away from the school, I faded into the crowd, a ghost with a beating heart and a hole for a face. Sometimes, in these intervening weeks, it feels like the missing piece is my heart. Or an arm. Or just half of me.
Krista was moving around me as I sat on my couch. She was in the full analyzing zone, her voice soothing, yet probing. "Do your feelings of incompleteness have anything to do with your belt being taken?"
"Yes, Krista, I am fluent in both subtext and metaphor," I can't help but feel my throat tighten. "Having an important moment and achievement taken away did trigger a feeling of loss. But there's more to it than that. For God sake, I feel like when I look at what I don't have, there's only a void inside."
"So what this is really rooted in, is validation." She muses, putting a pen to her lips, in what she probably thought was a thoughtful, clinical way. I roll my eyes at her banality. "Doc, I'm in the wrestling business. If I wasn't in this, at the bottom, for validation, I wouldn't be here. I'm telling you, that's not what this is."
Krista cut her eyes at me, trying to find the missing piece I was referring to and failing to see it. "Do you think this need goes back to your father?"
I stand so quickly that the game controller comes off my lap, flaring with anger. And damnedest thing, like sand spilling into an hourglass, the sensation of the hole there begins to fill. "Don't get fucking Freud on me, Miller."
"I'm just trying to put a reason on where this need began," Krista said, coming over. Her hands touching me, trying to soothe me back down aren't theraputic, they're yearning for intimacy even as she tries to be professional. We have our dance. Krista baits me, trying to test my limits, and she gets close enough to feel the hairs on my arm stand up. My breath trembles. Krista looks intent. I pull back.
"So when Matthews and Michaels took your belt, it robbed you of the sense of fulfillment holding on to the World Championship brought?"
"Again, yes," I say, as the sand leaks through the glass again and there is a giant cavity in my side. It burns like a cauterized stump.
"Nobody can make you feel like that without your consent, Kyle."
"I'm not LETTING Stormm and Vivacious make me feel inadequate, doctor. In fact, it's giving them too much credit to even say they triggered this episode. They took a physical item from me. I want it back. That's a simple, understandable motivation. But it's not a feeling of - of-"
"Have you considered that the feeling of feeling something missing stems from feeling unfulfilled in your life?"
"I - " for the moment, both myself and the churning, roiling whirlpool in my side are silent.
"I mean, think about it, Kyle. The urge to stay in wrestling. You grew up with no audience, and no platform, until you found wrestling. Now you get to perform, all the time, always on, and craft a persona for these people to gravitate to. But you feel lost because you always are the stage persona, the imago, with the real self hidden down."
My voice wavers, her eyes are searching my face. "This is all me. This is all the real me."
"Then why do you feel empty, if your job is to always be given validation every time you perform?"
There is a long, pregnant beat between us, of an indeterminate emotional charge. Then I turn away. For the first time, Krista's probing doesn't seem scholarly, nor does it seem like she has positive interests in mind. "Sometimes, doctor, I think you are trying to wind me up just so you can put me on a track and see where I go."
Krista just stands by the couch, her hands clasped innocently. "Now why would I do that, Kyle?" she asks. My upper lip is sweaty.
I grab my hoodie off the stool by the kitchen bar, walking down the hall to the studio booth. "I'm gonna get some work done. You can let yourself out. Our session's done for the day..."
"But..." Krista protests, but I'm not having any of it. I just nod my assent at the door. Yeah. Beneath my elbow, the pit yawns lazily. I want it to shut up too. I slam the door to my studio. Flip on the camera. And I just sit there, letting the film spin lazily. Everything Krista said buzzing in my head, rattling around like bees inside a shaken honeycomb. Why am I still doing this? Is there a part of me that's missing? What do I have left?
It builds to a crescendo until my head is about to burst with static and explode, painting the walls with grey matter. Sadistically, almost joyfully, the hole in me beats in time.
And I think I've found what I want to say, at least in this moment.
"You know.
I've had almost a month to reflect on things that are missing."
And it is the damnedest thing. As I speak and get more and more into it I feel the hole filling up, for that moment in time. Not sand sliding between the neck of a glass, but earth filling in a trench. The hole is receding. I feel a stirring of some kind of emotion, I can't pinpoint it. I don't know if this is making my case worse or better, but I can never readily identify emotion. Sometimes I feel like I'm less human for that. The only ones I know firsthand are sadness and anger. Go figure that. So when I feel something stirring, I am trying harder to work out what that might be.
I think I know what it is, now. It's anger. Anger fills the hole.
It is almost fifteen minutes later when I'm finished talking. I nailed what I wanted to say in one, profane, profoundly angry take. People get annoyed with me when I talk so much, but I can't help that I had quite a bit to say on this subject.
I'll upload this from the digital camera to the internets in time but for now I just hold the camera in my hand, looking at the receptacle for my rage, and feeling uncertain about what it says of myself. Maybe Krista's wrong. Maybe it isn't validation that fills the nothing inside me. Maybe it's always been a capacity for violence. Try as I might to be some kind of inspirational, beloved symbol of work hard, DIY aesthetic, maybe at the very bottom of it I got too much of my dad in me. Maybe his rough hands passed down to me. His prickly itch to lash out.
Maybe the reason I've kept wrestling so long is that it fills some deep seated, savage need to kick someone in the face so hard that I feel bone give way.
I think of my last words I filmed. "It is going to swallow each and every God damn one of you." And that gives me something to think on.
I'd rather not.
I have enough questions in my head and enough introspection so I'm wanting to get out. The hole is bleeding away away, expanding. It feels like it's not going to stop this time, not going to content with a chunk being gone. And I know when I'm feeling the most lost, there's one person I can turn to, my best girl. I know she might be a little cross with me checking in on her now, since according to her schedule she's at a read-through. But if I could just see Array, and talk to her, I know it would be like old times.
The hole is bigger than ever, in my chest, in my pit, in all of me. I feel like a hollowed man. As I go out into the street, I clutch my hoodie shut against my body like drapes, trying to hide it. Lest the man on the street see a person in pieces before them, a man who is more hole than human.
It's an Off-Broadway play, the kinds of things that either signal the end of a career or someone trying to get one off the ground. They aren't in a big, marquee, ostentatious theater. This isn't going to play to a packed house of thousands. And yet, the girl has chosen to audition for this role because it was meatier than the fare she had been getting cast in, mannequin nothing girlfriend roles with no agency in forgettable movies. I'd talked to Array about this choice, and she had wanted me to stay away until she was ready to perform. She wanted this to be her project.
I asked the void in my heart, why couldn't I respect her wishes for that right now? Why was I rushing to see her, to talk to her? Was it maybe, specifically, just her validation was all I needed? That couldn't be right... could it? Certainly I had gotten used to the crutch of her to lean on. When I needed it. Array was there.
But I couldn't just let her go, I rationalized with the hole.
I was still asking myself that as I made my way downtown to the venue. It was so much smaller than I was invisioning in my head. It wouldn't even register as a theater, just a brownstone with an ordinary shop door and one hanging sign to indicate there was going to be a play here. "The Bar At The End of the World", it read.
Well that's a dumb name for a play, I chuckled. My hole seemed to laugh in time. But it also hurt. I don't know. Maybe it hurt a little to see her branching on her own after all this time, at the same time I was proud.
I filled in, and found a seat in the back of the cupola. They were nice seats, felt, with high back and swinging arm rests. And then, enraptured, I saw the vision of the girl on the stage.
She was plainly dressed, sweatpants and a loose shirt, her hair in a messy bun, and she was opposite a short, muscular, dancer looking man in his forties in a tight tee. Neither one of them were made up or in costume, but they were reading from the script and rehearsing the lines that, in a few nights, they would perform to a packed house of, oh, fifty. When Array first spoke, her voice called out, halting now and then, but sweet and clear as a bell. "So, that night, in the garden, do you remember it?"
"I remember it so well."
"I said, why are you touching me like that? Why are you looking, at me, like that? And you just smiled, because, you knew."
"CUT!"
Array threw her hands up and groaned, as if this wasn't the first or even the fifth time the performance had been halted. I tuned in to the sound it came from, finding the director as Array crossed the stage. The man had a belly, and a salt and pepper beard, but he didn't look like the type of pretentious, upper class snob you would associate with hoity-toity "Artiste" theater. He looked like a friendly teacher. "Array, love, not feeling it. Not selling the emotion. Think of Eloise, she is pouring her heart out to Dean. She is trying to communicate the breaking down of a relationship, and trying to tell him of one night where they had it perfect."
"Ugh," Array sighs, "I know, Tim, it's just, I'm trying so hard..."
"Look, I know. But that's the thing. You're trying. Look." As Array crouched down on the cusp of the stage right next to the director, he smoothed his hands out in the air. "Think of someone in your mind, and begin dancing with them. You don't dance by trying to dance, thinking on each step. You just feel the movement. You feel what step they take, and you respond, honestly, with your own step. Don't think about dancing. Just dance."
The director pointed to his leading man, "Action."
"But Eloise, my words fail me now. I cannot tell you what we should already have said. I'm sorry, I'm going to have to close up the bar."
Array took a long, deep breath, standing there and holding her script. And when she opened her eyes, she looked out at the seats, and then I waved. Array's eyes sparkled as she looked on from the stage. And then, with a waver in her voice that gradually grew in strength, she began, ""That night. In the garden. do you remember it?"
"I remember it so well." Her partner replied.
Array nodded. "I said, why are you touching me like that? Why are you looking at me like that? And you just smiled because you knew."
"You knew then what we meant to each other. And that's what you'll always mean to me."
"Cut. Array, that was so much better." The director said, and several of the playmates and crew sitting in the front row spontaneously applauded. Array's face broke into an uncertain, but happy smile. She wasn't used to getting feedback.
"It felt so honest, love," her leading man told her.
"Thank you," she said, bowing graciously.
"Can I ask, who were you thinking about when you talked about that?" The director said softly.
Array looked into the crowd, and it was then that the void seemed to grin in triumph because she wasn't looking directly at me, but three rows in front, at the rangy, wiry hunk standing up. "I was thinking of my boyfriend. Alastair. He's been here for me the last few weeks through my decision to try for this play, and I just - I don't know what I'd do without him... I don't know if I can ever repay him for the unwavering loyalty and trust he's shown me."
I had had enough. I let the playbill slip to the floor as I exited the row of seats. Alastair, the Australian hunk from the movie based on Tyler Zane. The blonde asshole sauntered up to the stage, and Array met him with an embrace.
When I looked at what I didn't have, I only felt a void inside.
But I felt it being replaced, molecule by molecule, filling to the brim. I exited the theater, and if Array looked up from kissing Alastair... well, I didn't stick around to see it.
So maybe I had only unhealthy things to fill it left. Maybe now, more than ever, I was looking forward to getting back into wrestling, because it was all that I had in this moment, but that anticipation made me feel something for the first time in a month.
And when I stepped into that ring I would be nearing completion.
There was a hole here.
It's gone now.
It's easy for Krista to ask that. She doesn't see the chunk taken out of me right now, that aches like a phantom limb.
I've been mostly haunting the apartment like a ghost since I left the arena the night of the 10th. I've gone out in public, sure. When I went to take the kid to school. Johnny sensed it, I think. He looked at me in that worried way kids gauge their parents sometimes. They have no baseline to compare how they should feel with the spells they're seeing. Shit, kid, neither do I. As I had walked him in the doors and trudged away from the school, I faded into the crowd, a ghost with a beating heart and a hole for a face. Sometimes, in these intervening weeks, it feels like the missing piece is my heart. Or an arm. Or just half of me.
Krista was moving around me as I sat on my couch. She was in the full analyzing zone, her voice soothing, yet probing. "Do your feelings of incompleteness have anything to do with your belt being taken?"
"Yes, Krista, I am fluent in both subtext and metaphor," I can't help but feel my throat tighten. "Having an important moment and achievement taken away did trigger a feeling of loss. But there's more to it than that. For God sake, I feel like when I look at what I don't have, there's only a void inside."
"So what this is really rooted in, is validation." She muses, putting a pen to her lips, in what she probably thought was a thoughtful, clinical way. I roll my eyes at her banality. "Doc, I'm in the wrestling business. If I wasn't in this, at the bottom, for validation, I wouldn't be here. I'm telling you, that's not what this is."
Krista cut her eyes at me, trying to find the missing piece I was referring to and failing to see it. "Do you think this need goes back to your father?"
I stand so quickly that the game controller comes off my lap, flaring with anger. And damnedest thing, like sand spilling into an hourglass, the sensation of the hole there begins to fill. "Don't get fucking Freud on me, Miller."
"I'm just trying to put a reason on where this need began," Krista said, coming over. Her hands touching me, trying to soothe me back down aren't theraputic, they're yearning for intimacy even as she tries to be professional. We have our dance. Krista baits me, trying to test my limits, and she gets close enough to feel the hairs on my arm stand up. My breath trembles. Krista looks intent. I pull back.
"So when Matthews and Michaels took your belt, it robbed you of the sense of fulfillment holding on to the World Championship brought?"
"Again, yes," I say, as the sand leaks through the glass again and there is a giant cavity in my side. It burns like a cauterized stump.
"Nobody can make you feel like that without your consent, Kyle."
"I'm not LETTING Stormm and Vivacious make me feel inadequate, doctor. In fact, it's giving them too much credit to even say they triggered this episode. They took a physical item from me. I want it back. That's a simple, understandable motivation. But it's not a feeling of - of-"
"Have you considered that the feeling of feeling something missing stems from feeling unfulfilled in your life?"
"I - " for the moment, both myself and the churning, roiling whirlpool in my side are silent.
"I mean, think about it, Kyle. The urge to stay in wrestling. You grew up with no audience, and no platform, until you found wrestling. Now you get to perform, all the time, always on, and craft a persona for these people to gravitate to. But you feel lost because you always are the stage persona, the imago, with the real self hidden down."
My voice wavers, her eyes are searching my face. "This is all me. This is all the real me."
"Then why do you feel empty, if your job is to always be given validation every time you perform?"
There is a long, pregnant beat between us, of an indeterminate emotional charge. Then I turn away. For the first time, Krista's probing doesn't seem scholarly, nor does it seem like she has positive interests in mind. "Sometimes, doctor, I think you are trying to wind me up just so you can put me on a track and see where I go."
Krista just stands by the couch, her hands clasped innocently. "Now why would I do that, Kyle?" she asks. My upper lip is sweaty.
I grab my hoodie off the stool by the kitchen bar, walking down the hall to the studio booth. "I'm gonna get some work done. You can let yourself out. Our session's done for the day..."
"But..." Krista protests, but I'm not having any of it. I just nod my assent at the door. Yeah. Beneath my elbow, the pit yawns lazily. I want it to shut up too. I slam the door to my studio. Flip on the camera. And I just sit there, letting the film spin lazily. Everything Krista said buzzing in my head, rattling around like bees inside a shaken honeycomb. Why am I still doing this? Is there a part of me that's missing? What do I have left?
It builds to a crescendo until my head is about to burst with static and explode, painting the walls with grey matter. Sadistically, almost joyfully, the hole in me beats in time.
And I think I've found what I want to say, at least in this moment.
"You know.
I've had almost a month to reflect on things that are missing."
And it is the damnedest thing. As I speak and get more and more into it I feel the hole filling up, for that moment in time. Not sand sliding between the neck of a glass, but earth filling in a trench. The hole is receding. I feel a stirring of some kind of emotion, I can't pinpoint it. I don't know if this is making my case worse or better, but I can never readily identify emotion. Sometimes I feel like I'm less human for that. The only ones I know firsthand are sadness and anger. Go figure that. So when I feel something stirring, I am trying harder to work out what that might be.
I think I know what it is, now. It's anger. Anger fills the hole.
It is almost fifteen minutes later when I'm finished talking. I nailed what I wanted to say in one, profane, profoundly angry take. People get annoyed with me when I talk so much, but I can't help that I had quite a bit to say on this subject.
I'll upload this from the digital camera to the internets in time but for now I just hold the camera in my hand, looking at the receptacle for my rage, and feeling uncertain about what it says of myself. Maybe Krista's wrong. Maybe it isn't validation that fills the nothing inside me. Maybe it's always been a capacity for violence. Try as I might to be some kind of inspirational, beloved symbol of work hard, DIY aesthetic, maybe at the very bottom of it I got too much of my dad in me. Maybe his rough hands passed down to me. His prickly itch to lash out.
Maybe the reason I've kept wrestling so long is that it fills some deep seated, savage need to kick someone in the face so hard that I feel bone give way.
I think of my last words I filmed. "It is going to swallow each and every God damn one of you." And that gives me something to think on.
I'd rather not.
I have enough questions in my head and enough introspection so I'm wanting to get out. The hole is bleeding away away, expanding. It feels like it's not going to stop this time, not going to content with a chunk being gone. And I know when I'm feeling the most lost, there's one person I can turn to, my best girl. I know she might be a little cross with me checking in on her now, since according to her schedule she's at a read-through. But if I could just see Array, and talk to her, I know it would be like old times.
The hole is bigger than ever, in my chest, in my pit, in all of me. I feel like a hollowed man. As I go out into the street, I clutch my hoodie shut against my body like drapes, trying to hide it. Lest the man on the street see a person in pieces before them, a man who is more hole than human.
It's an Off-Broadway play, the kinds of things that either signal the end of a career or someone trying to get one off the ground. They aren't in a big, marquee, ostentatious theater. This isn't going to play to a packed house of thousands. And yet, the girl has chosen to audition for this role because it was meatier than the fare she had been getting cast in, mannequin nothing girlfriend roles with no agency in forgettable movies. I'd talked to Array about this choice, and she had wanted me to stay away until she was ready to perform. She wanted this to be her project.
I asked the void in my heart, why couldn't I respect her wishes for that right now? Why was I rushing to see her, to talk to her? Was it maybe, specifically, just her validation was all I needed? That couldn't be right... could it? Certainly I had gotten used to the crutch of her to lean on. When I needed it. Array was there.
But I couldn't just let her go, I rationalized with the hole.
I was still asking myself that as I made my way downtown to the venue. It was so much smaller than I was invisioning in my head. It wouldn't even register as a theater, just a brownstone with an ordinary shop door and one hanging sign to indicate there was going to be a play here. "The Bar At The End of the World", it read.
Well that's a dumb name for a play, I chuckled. My hole seemed to laugh in time. But it also hurt. I don't know. Maybe it hurt a little to see her branching on her own after all this time, at the same time I was proud.
I filled in, and found a seat in the back of the cupola. They were nice seats, felt, with high back and swinging arm rests. And then, enraptured, I saw the vision of the girl on the stage.
She was plainly dressed, sweatpants and a loose shirt, her hair in a messy bun, and she was opposite a short, muscular, dancer looking man in his forties in a tight tee. Neither one of them were made up or in costume, but they were reading from the script and rehearsing the lines that, in a few nights, they would perform to a packed house of, oh, fifty. When Array first spoke, her voice called out, halting now and then, but sweet and clear as a bell. "So, that night, in the garden, do you remember it?"
"I remember it so well."
"I said, why are you touching me like that? Why are you looking, at me, like that? And you just smiled, because, you knew."
"CUT!"
Array threw her hands up and groaned, as if this wasn't the first or even the fifth time the performance had been halted. I tuned in to the sound it came from, finding the director as Array crossed the stage. The man had a belly, and a salt and pepper beard, but he didn't look like the type of pretentious, upper class snob you would associate with hoity-toity "Artiste" theater. He looked like a friendly teacher. "Array, love, not feeling it. Not selling the emotion. Think of Eloise, she is pouring her heart out to Dean. She is trying to communicate the breaking down of a relationship, and trying to tell him of one night where they had it perfect."
"Ugh," Array sighs, "I know, Tim, it's just, I'm trying so hard..."
"Look, I know. But that's the thing. You're trying. Look." As Array crouched down on the cusp of the stage right next to the director, he smoothed his hands out in the air. "Think of someone in your mind, and begin dancing with them. You don't dance by trying to dance, thinking on each step. You just feel the movement. You feel what step they take, and you respond, honestly, with your own step. Don't think about dancing. Just dance."
The director pointed to his leading man, "Action."
"But Eloise, my words fail me now. I cannot tell you what we should already have said. I'm sorry, I'm going to have to close up the bar."
Array took a long, deep breath, standing there and holding her script. And when she opened her eyes, she looked out at the seats, and then I waved. Array's eyes sparkled as she looked on from the stage. And then, with a waver in her voice that gradually grew in strength, she began, ""That night. In the garden. do you remember it?"
"I remember it so well." Her partner replied.
Array nodded. "I said, why are you touching me like that? Why are you looking at me like that? And you just smiled because you knew."
"You knew then what we meant to each other. And that's what you'll always mean to me."
"Cut. Array, that was so much better." The director said, and several of the playmates and crew sitting in the front row spontaneously applauded. Array's face broke into an uncertain, but happy smile. She wasn't used to getting feedback.
"It felt so honest, love," her leading man told her.
"Thank you," she said, bowing graciously.
"Can I ask, who were you thinking about when you talked about that?" The director said softly.
Array looked into the crowd, and it was then that the void seemed to grin in triumph because she wasn't looking directly at me, but three rows in front, at the rangy, wiry hunk standing up. "I was thinking of my boyfriend. Alastair. He's been here for me the last few weeks through my decision to try for this play, and I just - I don't know what I'd do without him... I don't know if I can ever repay him for the unwavering loyalty and trust he's shown me."
I had had enough. I let the playbill slip to the floor as I exited the row of seats. Alastair, the Australian hunk from the movie based on Tyler Zane. The blonde asshole sauntered up to the stage, and Array met him with an embrace.
When I looked at what I didn't have, I only felt a void inside.
But I felt it being replaced, molecule by molecule, filling to the brim. I exited the theater, and if Array looked up from kissing Alastair... well, I didn't stick around to see it.
So maybe I had only unhealthy things to fill it left. Maybe now, more than ever, I was looking forward to getting back into wrestling, because it was all that I had in this moment, but that anticipation made me feel something for the first time in a month.
And when I stepped into that ring I would be nearing completion.
There was a hole here.
It's gone now.
