Post by Moxie James on Mar 21, 2021 22:57:52 GMT -5
Now my spirit can barely function, it's ugly
No longer fit for public consumption
Well, I guess that's somethin'
She kept her head up.
When she’d dipped a toe back in and Miles Lucky had rag dolled her around the ring because she’d just… she’d just frozen up. She’d thought she was ready but under the lights and the dull roar of a crowd who had never cheered her name, she had faltered.
She kept her head up.
When she’d picked up that half assed win over the girl in Union whose name she struggled so hard to remember even when she’d been standing across from her. Nyx was nothing to brag about… it had been just as embarrassing for Moxie as it had been for her.
She kept her head up.
When Emery had absolutely punished her and no matter how many times she’d gotten back up, it hadn’t been enough. She’d tasted the coppery tang of blood in her mouth and every muscle in her body had begged her to stop. Screamed at her to stop. But still, she’d gotten to her feet.
But no matter what she did. No matter how hard she worked in the gym… it wasn’t enough. It had never been enough.
She kept her head up.
She congratulated where she knew that she should. No matter that she wanted to rage against her own failures. She wanted to spit at her own feet. But it wasn’t important what she felt just what she did so she smiled and made sure that no one could ever say that she wasn’t a good sport.
Such a gracious fucking useless loser.
“You’re a fucking loser,” she slurred, gesturing towards herself in the simple floor length mirror propped against one wall in her too small Tokyo apartment.
The bottle or dark whiskey sloshed over her hands but she didn’t notice.
She kept her head up even when it felt like there was lead around her neck pulling her down down down.
She’d never been more free and she’d never felt more trapped. The glass of the bottle clanked against her teeth and the amber liquid bit her lips like a lover. She kept her head up, she was a gracious loser in public…
The best fucking useless piece of trash she could be.
But here behind six locks on the door no one could see her swing her fists into things that scraped her knuckles raw, disappear down into the bottle and back up again, angry and ready to fight… ready to fight…
The only person she wanted to fight was that useless loser slumped in the mirror in front of her.
She took another deep sip. Whiskey wasn’t usually her thing. Lungfulls of smoke were usually her vice but tonight she didn’t want to feel that soft sanitized and far away version of her feelings. She wanted the liquid burn of her own emotions as they spilled out of the places she shoved them.
“What do you want?” the woman in the mirror asked her.
Moxie didn’t recognize her.
Or maybe she did. It felt like she should.
“I just want…”
The mirror cut her off with a hiss that sounded like the crunching of glass. “Think about it.”
“I have,” Moxie shot back.
She had.
“They want to know who you are,” the thing in the mirror said, it’s teeth too white and shiny as it leaned closer even though Moxie wasn’t sure she’d moved. But she had. Still the mirror image of the thing that she had twisted herself into to try to fit.
Moxie rolled her eyes, “No they don’t. They don’t care who I am. Let’s be real here,” she scoffed, tipping the bottle at that thing that wore her face. “No one has ever… and I mean ever given a single fucking shit about who I am or what I wanted.”
“Even you.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, between long pulls from the bottle. She was drunk enough to talk to her own reflection (if that’s what this was) so what was finishing the bottle? “Even me.”
The thing rasped a laugh. “What are you supposed to be?” Moxie spat.
“I am only what the gods made me,” the thing said. She said. The Moxie in the mirror said.
“Edgelord,” she mumbled at herself, tipping back the rest of the bottle before she let it fly at the mirror. Her slippered feet crunched over glass as she staggered to her feet and into the apartment’s tiny kitchen and fumbled with the tap.
“That was dramatic,” the thing goaded from her reflection in the silvery faucet
She ignored it.
“You can’t escape yourself,” it laughed from her reflection in the black TV screen as she passed by the living room.
She ignored it.
It didn’t ignore her. She could feel it watching from every sliver of mirror on the floor and…
“I don’t know what you want from me,” she said, quiet.
“I want you to stop being a useless, pathetic, piece of shit trash that never fits in anywhere and instead of letting it make you hard and angry you let it make you soft and weak. You mewling fucking pest.” The words dripped with disgust.
Did those words come from her own mouth or the pieces of mirror that stared up with blank, empty eyes from the floor. She didn’t know. Maybe she’d never know.
“Kuntz is going to fuck you up, you know that?” A bitter laugh. “Like everyone else your worthless ass steps in front of. You just walk around out here letting the whole goddamn world hurt you.”
“Shut up,” Moxie snapped. “The room is spinning kinda and I just honestly don’t have the emotional capacity to pick apart the implications of talking to myself this way.”
“This way? Ohhhh, you mean the way that literally everyone else talks to you, huh?” The voice was dredged in a cold, burning hatred. Disgust.
For her.
From her.
“And you let them.”
It wasn’t done yet.
“You sit there and you try to laugh it off like nothing ever bothers you while they make fun of you on Twitter, in their DMs. You know they’re talking about how fucking stupid you look. The way you go out there and go out there and go out there and you lose every time.”
A dark laugh.
“Telling you you might as well disappear again because this sport doesn’t want you and it never needed you.”
“Shut up.” There. That sounded like her own voice, even if it sounded weak. Pathetic. Mewling. Everything that she… it… the creature that lived inside of her own heart, maybe… had said she was.
“Shut up,” it mocked. “Or what? You’ll drink some more? Cry some more? Pathetic.”
Moxie James, whatever that was, tipped her head back and screamed in frustration.
“That,” the thing in the mirror said, smug satisfaction in its voice. In Moxie’s voice. “Let that out. Bring that into the ring with you against that motherfucker Kuntz. That wannabe crustpunk fuck.
But you don’t get it, do you? You’re going to go out there and try your little baby best to win,” the voice had turned sour and mocking, a gross parody of baby talk as it spat the words at her. “Look at you go, Little Moxie Mox, you sure do fucking know how to eat a loss with a goddamn smile on your face while the whole fucking world laughs. Send out those congratulations tweets. Thanks for beating the shit out of me, golly. It sure was fun. I learned a whole lot about being a goddamn joke.
Yeah, that.
That’s what you sound like you stupid little cunt.”
Cruel and cold now, “I am sick and goddamn fucking tired of being laughed at, Olivea.”
“Please stop,” she begged, clinging to herself. Knees drawn up to her chest.
“No, not until you win a fucking match, my dude. Not until you stop treating these stupid fucks like your friends while they laugh at you. While they make you a joke. But why wouldn’t they? You let them. You let it start when that stupid goddamn cunt Riley Savell lead you around by the pussy and made you a parody of who you were supposed to be. She made you their punching bag and you grinned and took it because you wanted friends.”
“Stop.”
“Who will you be when you go out there to face Kuntz? Tell me…”
Another laugh, cold and oily. “Will you be yourself? Will you take their fucking jokes with a smile when you lose to him too? Golly gee thanks for beating me into the fucking canvas, I sure did learn from it. You stupid clown. You pathetic child.
No matter how often you let them make you the punchline of their jokes… they won’t like you. They won’t be your friends.
No matter how high you keep your empty little head up all you’ll see is the way this ridiculous excuse for a career crumbles around you. Everywhere that counts, Olivea, you have fallen short. You have failed.”
She couldn’t argue with it.
She knew that.
“It ends here.”
And then.
“You end here.”
She sat up, wide eyed.
“W-what?”
A laugh, like dark things promised.
“No, you heard me right, Olivea. You end here.”