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They ask him why he does this.
“Because I like it. Because it’s fun.”
~~~~~~~~
It gets to a point where it stops hurting. Or maybe it doesn’t hurt enough. Maybe no amount of pain will ever bring him back to himself.
He stares at his reflection in the mirror.
“What did you just do to yourself?”
He counts bruises on his cheek, takes inventory of the scars on his back. He recognizes that he’s bleeding but it still doesn’t hurt enough. The blood, the shards of glass on his shoulder, the purple around his eye, these are all signs of something that he should probably fear. Instead, he keeps chasing it, and it keeps on eluding him. So he counts bruises and gathers scars, wipes away at the blood on his forehead, and he thinks that it must be somewhere. He’ll find it. He just has to keep going.
A faint ache travels through him, but he can’t register it. His mind is too far gone and his body has moved on to another state. He keeps moving. One airport after the next. One drive, and then another. They all blend into one and he can’t remember the last time he felt anything.
The voices return. He must be an idiot because he thought they left for good when he started wrestling. They scream as he stares at the mirror. They get louder with every scar. He pounds fists against his head. He tries to locate his body. He tries to run after his mind. But now he’s out of breath, and the voices still echo. They tell him that he’s a bastard. A fuck up. A screwed up son of a bitch. They sound like home.
He doesn’t argue.
And he’s spilling blood in a different city every night. He’s slipping out.
He thinks he must have lost a piece of himself somewhere between Chicago and Philly. Or Puerto Rico and Germany. Or maybe before that. Maybe that one sleepless night lying in bed in Cincinnati.
Maybe it wasn’t just his mother’s head that got cracked that night.
Maybe it wasn’t just their TV that was lost.
But he refuses to remember. So he does the only thing he knows how to do. He counts bruises and collects scars.
He hurts himself. And then he hurts other people.
He takes another shot. He takes another fall. And he waits for his mind and his body to reunite. Then he laughs at himself because he’s lost, and no one he’s known has ever found their way. Why should he be any different?
So he bleeds and he waits, and he thinks “When did this stop being fun?”