- Messages
- 295
- Points
- 93
I have been here before.
Many…many times before.
And it never quite hurts any less.
Precipice of victory, everything flowing through my body. The energy, the desire, the knot in my stomach believing of what I think will happen next. The fire, the passion, the emotion in overdrive as the adrenaline pours through my system in that precious, fleeting moment. All that I want, much of what I believe to be, sitting in the palm of my hand and ready to be taken.
A high greater than any drug.
And then…
Crash.
Burn.
Instead of being warmed by the fires of my victory I’m suffocating in the smoke of my defeat. Hands in mere seconds turning from handling gold to carrying the ashes of my ambitions. It’s an undesirable place to be in, one that I’ve come to find myself coming to grips with more often than I ever wanted to or even remotely expected to do so. From blowing wind behind me on the top of that post, to wind circulating the misery of my shattered dreams around me like a tornado. But I’m used to it. Growing…maturing…learning from the times I’ve found myself in that spot, never fearing the realities of it. Though no matter how many times I do end up there, it never gets easier. It never gets any less bitter, never any less kinder on the heart. It’s easy to bottle everything up until I’m alone in my hotel room and let the emotions flow, clutch a bottle of red and find some reassurance. But again, I’ve been there and it does little to help. It only results in an insufferable hangover and threatening knocks at the door when you sleep through the time you’re supposed to be out of the room. Well truly past that hour. Grand Rampage was ideally the statement night. The night where I defeat Harper Lee, I stake my flag in the ground as the next contender to Minerva’s title and shed myself of the narratives that I can only blame myself for existing. The night where I buried the last several months up until that point in the desert, in an unmarked grave for nobody to ever remember, for nobody to ever feel the desire to exhume. Yet, it was not meant to be. I arrived at Grand Rampage standing at a crossroads; a ominous place where I can show up as the Hikari Kanno people believe me to be, or choose to be the Hikari Kanno that I have been. And in the wake of my defeat, I can’t look back and decide which it was that showed up. The hungry, determined Hikari Kanno would refused to back down, clutched both fists as tight as she could and swung for the fences without regard? Or the Hikari Kanno that took it all for granted, showed up with a complacent mind, a complacent heart and simply did the bare minimum? It wasn’t my best showing, yet not one second went by that I felt I was doing myself a disservice, disrespecting the chance that Captain Charisma gave me bringing me back to Voltage earlier this year, or disappointing those who still believe in me…believe in that dream of mine. But I lost. I lost and so too did I lose that chance that I’ve wanted since this season began and quite truthfully, the opportunity that I couldn’t get, that I couldn’t earn, that I never deserved yet was entitled in thinking otherwise. Such entitlement that was a cancer, eating away, feasting in this exact moment time and time again this season.
And so I find myself standing in front of this wall that has fallen in front of me.
At this painful crossroads, leaving me with seemingly one option.
A wall so tall I lose sight of its top through the clouds, one so wide it dips over the horizon on either side. One so thick that when I lay my hand against it, I feel nothing but harsh, cold stillness. Feel nothing. Sense nothing. This is one that is not supposed to be conquered; it’s one that signals the end of the journey. The sole option is a long road that is littered with the remains of battered and broken dreams that others once held in their grasp, none different than I do now. It is a graveyard, one where the fragrance of victory, the fragrance of success, is replaced with the foul tones of decaying ideals and stories of failures who lingered on down this road with the false sense of hope that they would someday reach the end of the wall and wrap around it; get themselves back on track towards those lofty ambitions of theirs. And at the end, there is still a mountain to climb, just the reward for reaching the top of it is one where you can die with some peace and mind knowing you hung on and dragged your lifeless body further than all those you passed along the way.
I had once - or rather, a few times - said I would accept the hand fate has given me.
But this wall stands before me because I was simply beaten.
Not because the Hikari Kanno of the last nine months showed up to Grand Rampage. Not because the Hikari Kanno who stumbled and fumbled so many opportunities to better her situation, to actually rise up and become the Universal Womens Champion while she was on Showdown couldn’t beat Harper Lee. Not because I’m not enough, not good enough, not deserving enough. I’ve been here before, I’ve done my own brand of sulking, I’ve licked my wounds, I’ve allowed myself to get miserable but it doesn’t end on one lone defeat and it doesn’t end just because I lost to Harper of all people. It sucks. There’s a bitter taste in my mouth but just like I lost to Ms. Extreme and just like I lost to Mr. DEDEDE, I’m taping the fists up once again. I’ll cop my loss and I don’t need another six months of penitence to teach me to be humble, to reset my priorities and take any kind of backwards step. I’m not revaluation shit, I’m getting ready to keep going.
Because I ain’t fucking broken just yet.
And I ain’t letting this fucking wall stop me.
If I can’t become the next Universal Womens Champion, then I’ll just have to win.
Win this week. Win next week. Win every fucking week. Scratch, claw, fight tooth and nail, and if winning every fucking week regardless of who I need to beat in order to do so doesn’t change anything? Then I’ll just keep fucking going and start turning this crossroads I’m standing at into a memorial for my own perseverance. This isn’t the epiphany I’m obtaining with some faux clarity in the eleventh hour, I’ve done it a lot. I had a bit of it before Grand Rampage even, but this? It’s different.
It will never end as ‘just a dream’.
There is no ‘change’. This defeat won’t spark an alteration of my ideals. I won’t pivot to becoming something else. There is no ‘newfound’ identity. There…problems I face and all that I do to undermine myself are not fixed by changing anything but the sole approach to responding to setbacks. This entire season has been a running battle of coping with defeats and undesirable situations through toxic, ultimately detrimental ways. I know who I am. I know how fucking good I am and quite frankly I doubt there’s a single person alive who doesn’t share the same perspective of myself as I do. I never truly ‘hold’ onto regrets, they form the scars on my body and that's about it. But I do regret how I’ve dealt with so many similar situations where I looked to the next week and sat on my dejection more so than powering through it. Victory helps sooth all pains and there’s a fucking lot of time between now and the night I’ve been dreaming of being ‘the one’. ‘The moment’. I COULD sit here and feel sorry for myself that I was so close. I COULD sit here and feel ashamed that I lost to a filthy ratbag in Harper. I COULD sit here and believe that this fucking wall in front of me is the very end. Or I can win. I can beat Valerie this week. I can show up next week and beat whoever. I can have a reason to fight at Fighting Spirit. I can manufacture a fucking miracle in these next few weeks so I can end the season still fulfilling the goal I had the moment I lost the Hardcore Championship to TLA. And if it isn’t Pain For Pride still, then I’ll just raise my fucking stock so high that nobody can deny me come the draft. And I’ll kick next season off with all the momentum behind me to bury the past and ensure my dream becomes a reality. I’m not broken. I never truly was. But this time I’m not letting a setback become a shackle.
I’m tearing the wall down brick by brick.
Stop me.
And I don’t think it’s going to happen this week with you, Valerie.
I admire people’s spark, I admire their tenacity, their determination and persistence in this world. They alone can raise just about anyone up to the heights of becoming a Champion, becoming ‘somebody’, becoming an integral part of just about any brand. The world saw what little, relatively uncared for Valerie Hellstorm is capable of at Grand Rampage; a competitor, a fighter. But my ambitions are selfish ones. Rooted in pure disregard for the interests and benefits of those around me. In a perfect world, you should be able to take all that you learned from the Grand Rampage experience and leverage it into raising your stock. Maybe you can still do that in a match against someone of my calibre, with my own focus and determination to just about squash anyone who threatens to stop me beneath my boot. But that would be a mere moral victory, falling well short of a legitimate victory and what it would mean. In a perfect world, the world takes notice of Valerie Hellstorm, but this isn’t quite a perfect world. It’s animalistic, survival of the fittest. The beast with the most to gain, with the greater desire, with the sharpest claws prevail and in a week where I am forced to re-measure my journey, forced to pivot, to let go and once again seek, I simply can’t allow my claws to be blunt; I simply cannot allow my fangs to not be capable of piercing the toughest armours. Selfishness must prevail; my own intent to win and win and win regardless of what is thrown before me cannot be ignored. I’ve waded through these waters before, I’ve allowed my greatest skills to become dulled by the misery of coming up short. And whether you are merely just fodder for me to chew on, to simply ‘bounce back’ is irrelevant to the greater picture. Sharpen until I can sharpen no more. Until these fangs can puncture all that they intend to sink into. The greater picture is tearing down this wall before me, refusing to fall to the wayside, to walk down that long, winding graveyard and become just another ‘could have been’. It’s all I see this match as. There is a possibility, a greater possibility than I’m willing to admit, that at some point in this journey I’ll become broken, just like so many otherwise and perhaps I’ve been so countless times before when I’ve failed to recompose myself in the wake of such defeats, but sadly for you, Harper Lee did not break me. I remain unbroken, undeterred, simply salivating at this chance to merely swing at my greater foe for the first time.
The first of many.
The first of perhaps a thousand.
All to bring it all down and become the master of my own fate.
永遠に夢を見続けろ、大きな夢想家よ。
