eight DAYS ago

The crowd cheered me on as I entered the cage. There was no cage that had cut the tension between my foe from the time I saw him in qualifiers. It was the last round. I had this preceding knowledge that I would win. Maybe it was determination and hope that conjured this thought as I wrapped my hands in bandages in the shadow of my trainer. He left me in the cage soon after like a parent leaving his child at the mall. I was lost. So lost that I couldn't identify my enemy in this fight. But I knew I had to beat him to get that belt that was imprinted into my memory like a tool of nostalgia.

    He landed his first punch on me. Right in the schnozz with his right. I should've been disoriented but I dodged the next and the next. My play was to tire him out and then attack with the full force of my fistful presence, like Muhammad Ali did in the The Fight. I was backed up against the cage for a hot minute, not knowing whether to abandon the jig. Then I saw an opportunity in how he kicked.

    My opponent was a wrestler by physique and lumbered in his kicks. There was a cog in his machine and I used that to my advantage. I circled the cage upon escaping his beatdown. Having not landed a punch yet, the crowd was half booing me and half cheering me. I was making my foe run for it. Like a dog over a bone. And a dog will get tired. I saw him stumble while chasing me and he had to regain himself to be jumping on his feet, mirroring my movement.

    That was my moment. I sped at him with a flurry of attacks. Right, left, hook, uppercut, knee, kick. To the head, to the stomach. My feet adjusted to the kind of fist I made; to the punch I made. His head bobbled in slow motion, blood flying out of his mouth, his eyes rolling back as he fell to the floor from the lack of stamina and the beating from my hands that cried for violence. It was a violent scene...

But it was only a dream of a memory. A memory that felt so long ago, but it had only been five years. My appendix hadn't woken me in the night for once. The dream hurt me even more because it had shown the peak of my game. I had woken up to find myself in the dumps of Hotel Brownwood, living off the prize money, a contender for my only source of cash. I drank water out of a red tupperware sippy cup that gave the liquid a little bit of a plastic flavour. The vending machine outside didn't have any bottles, only cans of soda. So I had to refill my sippy cup at the water cooler inside the lobby.

I heard the clip clop of horse hooves in the background of the few cars that passed the motel. I opened the door to my room to have a morning smoke outside. A boy was riding the horse. Most Texan schoolboys did it. I liked the kid, he had spirit and vigor that reminded me of me. I was training him in MMA because I had nothing better to do and he had nothing better to do but be trained. He should be at school so I was surprised to see him today. He usually came to the motel on the weekend, bagging and hooking all of the training equipment to his horse. The boy's name was Suparto Cataclyst.