Post by Lantlas on Apr 13, 2006 0:11:08 GMT -5
I stood on the cliff, as the sun faded away from my vision, coloring the sky with the brightest of reds and oranges. The dividing line of night was approaching quickly, and I noticed the color of the sky matched her hair from the right perspective. We'd spent the entire day walking along the boardwalk, talking about our careers and our personal lives, and how amazingly they seemed to correlate. Nothing else in the world mattered. I was slowly beginning to understand why I felt so strongly about what I thought I lost, because something this wonderful is just so amazing that I felt like I had to hold on to it. Someone this special couldn't possibly do those things my paranoia had predicted.
I felt like the darkness within me was subsiding. No longer was I paranoid about who was going to betray me, or what was going to happen. Since I'd come to PCW, I'd overcome the odds every single time, and the fans were starting to notice. Defeating Jason Willard at the most recent showcase earned me a standing ovation, honestly something I was very unfamiliar with. I wasn't quite sure how to respond. While I had always been cordial with fans on an individual basis, they were never sure what to think when it came to actual reception in the arena. That was the case with most of the wrestlers as well. None of them were sure what to think at first, and most of them still have no idea. In this, I have become the target of three men and one woman, their minds on nothing but their own greed and self-gratification. One with a devious succubus as a wife, thinking of spawning more offspring... The emo kid who contradicts himself more than a list of oxymorons... And the American Nightmare, whom I still didn't know much about, since America seems to have quite a few nightmares that don't designate the names.
I realized that once again, I had started to let my mind wander. My focus returned to the one beside me, releasing the strain of dealing with one-dimensional cretins for just a small amount of time. A distraction from reality with an image of pure beauty and perfection. For some reason, however, I couldn't seem to get that small feeling in the pit of my stomach to go away. In the moment where everything should feel infinite, there was one very tiny distraction. I ignored it, and realized she was staring at me. I felt like I had to be honest with her, but I realized how stupid I might come across.
"Lantlas, is there something wrong?"
How many times have I heard that phrase in my life? Multiple languages, countless occasions... This was the moment of truth, if there was to ever be one. I couldn't go on and not explain what was going on inside of my head. "I know this is going to sound weird, but I feel like I've met you before."
As the gentle breeze blew a wave of her hair over one of her eyes, I saw her hand reach up to her face to push it away. My eyes locked on her fingers, something seemed familiar about them. The nail polish, the softness and texture... The ring! Suddenly, I wasn't where I was standing anymore. I was standing in a dark room, bleeding, covered in water. I looked down at the floor and saw the broken shards of glass, some of them dripping with the blood I'd shed breaking through the window. I checked behind me, and it was the exact same door. I looked through the hallway and saw the footprints of the poor son of a bitch I'd caught her with. I checked the window sill for the ring, and there it was. Gleaming on the sill, as if it'd never been put on. In fact, it looked like it was still on her finger. The form of her fingers returned, and I realized I was looking down at her hand, which was now at her side. Her voice interrupted my apparent delusion... "Lantlas, it feels like I've met you before as well. It feels like we were meant to meet each other, because we seem to know so much in so little time."
I looked around, and the sky had grown darker. Night was setting, and the moon was rising. A few of the stars gleamed in the sky, and the tide was bringing in some stronger waves. It almost felt like a storm was coming.
"That's not what I mean," I responded. Her curious face led me to the conclusion that she didn't realize what I'd meant. Reluctantly, I decided to continue. "I have memories of you. A time when we were together, and they're so vivid that I don't believe they can only be dreams. I have feelings attached to them, strong emotions that couldn't have been created from something that never happened."
Silence, as seemed to be the response to many of the things I've said to many different people over the years. The thoughts were computing in her head, and I saw her stare move away from looking me directly into the eyes. She knew something, and I could tell merely from the changed expression on her face. She turned towards the cliff, and suddenly it wasn't night-time anymore. It was mid-afternoon, and I felt words coming from my mouth that I, myself, wasn't saying.
"If I were to die tonight, my life would not be wasted for knowing that such beauty existed in this world. Amidst all the violence and hatred lie the gates of Heaven in your eyes. As I lie on the top of a hill while the freshly rained clouds hover mere feet away, I watch my breath filter into the air. I close off my knowledge of what pain and tribulation my heart may suffer in addition to what it has, and I focus on the innocence of one too young to know of this real life we all must face. I long to know her excitement for each new sunrise, her oblivion to the outside world we all believe is so important. We spend our lives either in search of Heaven or trying to get there. I know that Heaven is to not know, because we're too distracted to sit down and look for the single cloud passing over lighter than the rest, reminding us that brighter things are to come. In the eyes of the girl I love, and in my peace with the sky, just before sunrise I have a moment to know I can feel peace. If I were to never wake again, the dream would last forever."
I looked down at the ground, seeing the shadows and wondering if she would appreciate the heart I'd put into those words. Her eyes lit up, as they always did when I said something that touched her... Knowing that, I wasn't really sure how it had affected her. Then again, how did I know her eyes lit up when something had touched her? If I'd never met her and everything I thought I knew was wrong... this all just didn't seem right. "I would be the luckiest girl on the face of the earth if my husband said those words to me at the altar," she gleed. I felt the fluttering in my heart, as the greatest feeling in the world was making her smile. Her soft lips reached up to touch mine, but before I felt the kiss, the sky grew dark around me again. I looked up from the ground, and I was back where I'd started from. Her eyes finally returned to mine, a tear forming in the center of her left. This certainly wasn't coincidence, for if nothing had ever existed, I would've just been given the crazy confused look I always did.
She turned back towards the edge of the cliff, and I heard a sigh escape from her lungs. "We have met before, Lantlas..." The coldness in her voice, it sounded so cryptic. At the sound of my name, "Lantlas", I found myself in another lost memory of mine. New Year's Eve, there had been a show that night. The show had gone on late, because the ring crew didn't arrive on time because of the weather. The fans were growing restless, and we knew we had to put on a helluva show to appease them. I checked my cell phone... 11:25 P.M.. It began to vibrate from a text message coming in, and I knew what was coming. "Where are you? I don't want to spend New Year's Eve alone!" I couldn't respond, my match was up next. I dropped my jacket on the locker room bench, as I heard my music play. I went on to deliver a match that left etched in all the heads of the fans as one of the greatest spectactles they'd ever seen. Bryan Fury, then known as B Styles, and I had managed to tear the house down. Fury was a friend and longtime tag team partner of Al Laiman, so to wrestle him at such a big event was truly an honor.
Still on the rush from being in front of all those people with one of wrestling's greatest, I got back to my locker room. I could hear the noise beeping from my phone, knowing there were missed messages. I looked at the clock... 12:32 A.M. Oh, shit. I'd missed an event that was very important to her, and I knew I was in trouble. Since I'd never driven a day in my life, I had to run as fast as I could to that little house. Before I quite made it, I saw her sitting on the sidewalk. It was freezing outside, but she had no jacket. The poor thing, I can't believe I did this to her. I carefully approached, not wanting to disturb whatever mood in which she might be. She was relatively calm most of the time, but there had never been a moment like this where I knew I'd messed up big time. As I walked up behind her, it wasn't New Year's Eve anymore. It was back to the cliff in Charleston, and she was sitting on the ground, much like she had been that night. A cold wind sweeped in from the ocean, and I pulled my jacket closed. I sat down next to her, and realized just how emotional she was getting. It was that same cold, heartbroken look she'd had the night I missed New Year's Eve. I reached over and tried to put my arm around her, but she shyed away. I knew this wasn't good. I decided to ask if maybe she was remembering the same things I was.
"I'm sorry that I hurt you on New Year's Eve."
"Don't dwell on it. It will only make it worse."
Wait a second, double take. I thought that it never actually happened. How could she possibly tell me not to dwell on something that never actually happened? Before I could say anything else, she turned to look at me. "I'll be blunt, don't expect more than friendship out of this."
Expect more than friendship? Weren't you the one who'd taken my hand in order to convince me that I wouldn't end up alone? All these contradictions, so many things not making any sense, the scene around me began to change one more time. Holding a cell phone in my hand, it shaking but not from the vibration of a message incoming. My hand was shaking from reading the message on my phone.
"Don't dwell on it. That'll only make it worse."
I scrambled, the instinct still driving me to somehow grasp on to anything I could. I typed in: "Can the feud between us be over, please?" A few seconds later, I got another response.
"Yes, but I'll be blunt. Don't expect more than friendship."
I felt my heart drop. I'd known it was over a long time ago, even though it confused me to how she broke up with me for her cheating on me. I still didn't have my ring back, and this growing sensation inside of me was just leading me down a trip of mental and physical destruction. I found that my heart was beginning to hurt when I took a breath, and my pulse was increasing. I could hardly see straight, and my voice could barely escape my throat. I leaned over, clutching my chest, almost subconsciously trying to protect myself from pain that would add on to the dwelling storm already going on inside my soul. I fell to the ground, and saw the sky changing from the roof of the locker room it was a few seconds ago. I felt my head collide with a piece of rock, and I was back on the Charleston cliff.
I quickly sat up and looked around for her, but she was nowhere in sight. She'd disappeared like rain on a mountain, much as she had once before. There was no way this could've been my own imagination. Even looking into her eyes as she was letting me down once again, it was real emotion, both good and bad. I heard a footstep behind me, and I looked to see blue leather pants. I knew it had been too long since I'd heard from him.
"What's the matter, human?" he cockily asked, "lost your marbles?"
I wasn't in the mood for sarcasm. I pulled myself to my feet, and I looked... myself... in his green, glowing eyes. "Let me hear it, what do you have to say this time?"
"Things are confusing now, aren't they? I've stepped back and allowed this human emotion to run rampant throughout you, and look where it's gotten you. You don't know what's real anymore."
"What do you mean?"
"You're so desperate for answers that you'll accept any explanation whatsoever just for closure. You let the psycho loony tell you that memories you know you had were nothing more than foreshadowings, that it wasn't real."
"It was real then?"
"Of course it was, you just supressed it and hid from it so much that things got mixed up when you did remember them. You wanted to feel these things so badly that you conjured an image of her up in your mind just to try to feel what you once did."
"I don't understand."
He was getting frustrated, and I sensed that I wasn't picking up on something he was trying to explain. "You running into her, you spending time with her, all these things you've seen over the past couple days are nothing more than your memory recreating her. It was an image from your subconscious, a falsified recreation. Your feelings run so deep that your mind tried to feel those things so much that you were seeing things that weren't really there, but you wanted them to be. The wrestling moniker she gave you is outdated. She left HHW right after the incidents you looked up and never made another wrestling appearance again. She left the country after what happened between you and her, even though you conveniently forgot your involvement in breaking her up so badly that she left you to feel loved by someone else."
That son-of-a-bitch! Without thinking, I dove at him with my hands around his throat. He flipped me over and pinned me to the ground with his foot. "Angry little human, you're mad, aren't you? That rage is building up inside of you. Your emotions of betrayal and lost love are now being replaced by the spawn of darkness created by what I've put into your mind, by convincing you that it was your fault what happened." He walked around me, as he had so many times before, and then kicked me in the gut and got down in my face. "YOU THINK YOUR OPPONENTS CAN'T SEE THROUGH THIS?! Even through defeating them, one of them openly mocks you, calls you a fake, threatens to end your life. Another one uses his wife to convince him that your defeat of him never meant anything. Driven by his human greed, he distracts himself from reality in order to feel better about himself, and seek the vengeance of something that he doesn't even know why he's fighting for it. And Douglas, for all his talking about fantasy sure doesn't have a problem doing the same things you do with a different name, does he?"
"I did notice that. Fucking hypocrite."
"But you've known this from the beginning. You've dealt with him before, where all he does is say one thing and do another. This stupid human claims to have no emotion, but gets angry, depressed, and rabid about anything and everything. He claims the belt doesn't mean anything to him, yet he fought for belts back in HHW and won them. If he really didn't have a reason to live and was really that hopeless, he would've offed himself and made the world a better place a long time ago."
"Humans can be so very stupid, can't they?"
I felt another kick to my gut, and I bent over clutching myself. "THEN STOP FUCKING ACTING LIKE ONE! Letting these things get to you to where you're imagining things just to remember them, to bring closure to them... you can be so pathetic sometimes."
"That's where you're wrong," I responded. "You don't know what these emotions do, since your comprehension of them is minimal. It burns inside of me, it brings me to the place where you want me to be. I sit, and I remember all these things that have happened right before I fight someone like Jason Willard, and the Elven blood pumps and I am stronger, meaner, and much more dangerous. Look at my defeat of Willard last week for the proof. The war inside my head was waging, and instead of subconsciously shutting down, I fed off of it. I let it focus me on destroying the pest who'd been bothering me for the last few weeks, and he fell like all the rest."
"Yet when that stupid man who was going to betray you was in peril, you still saved him."
"Sometimes the human side of me brings me to do the right thing. Compassion isn't always my enemy, and although it has gotten me burned before, I do not regret it. At Hostile Takeover, I team with an enemy and someone I know is one of the most talented wrestlers in the industry. It will spell the end for those three humans who have brought this unto themselves."
"A trip down the Elven Path."
"A storm is coming, one which no mere mortal can survive."
"Survive what?" I heard a voice interrupting my thoughts. It was Devon, what the hell was she doing here? I turned around, but when I looked back, my Elven side had disappeared.
"Nothing, just talking..."
"To yourself?"