O Sonho

O SONHO --- I do not usually write down things that did not happen. I have said before that I deal in what is on the record, and a dream is the opposite of that — it is the one category of event with no witnesses, no tape, and no result. I am writing this one down because of what was wrong with it. --- WHAT WAS IN IT Saturday. The Foundry. My match. It was accurate, which is the first thing to say. Dreams are usually approximately correct and this one was correct in detail. The floor of the tunnel is tacky in one specific place about four metres before the curtain and it was tacky in the dream. The house lights come up white for me because I asked for white in my second week and nobody has ever changed it back. The braid was tight. There were no earrings and there was no moment in the dream where I noticed there were no earrings, which is how I know the drawer is closed properly. Drummond came out second. She is a former champion and she is six and two and she has a way of standing at the top of the ramp for two beats longer than the music requires, which I have watched eleven times and which I do not think is arrogance. I think she is listening to the room. The match was fifteen minutes, near enough. She backed me to the wall twice and I paid for both. I broke her rhythm in the fourth minute with a low kick to the lead leg and I did it again in the sixth and again in the ninth, because that is what I do, and because a Scottish brawler who plants her weight forward is a woman who has decided to trade and I am very happy to trade. She caught me with something heavy around eleven. I do not remember which. That part was vague and I think that is normal. And then I hit the Skull Crusher, and the referee's hand came down three times, and it was over. --- WHAT WAS WRONG WITH IT Nobody was surprised. That is the whole of it. That is the entire reason this is on paper. The building did not make the noise. There is a noise a room makes when something happens that it did not expect — a half-second gap and then the whole place at once — and it did not happen. There was applause. It was ordinary applause. It was the applause you give at the end of a match you assumed was going a certain way, and it stopped at the normal time. The referee raised my hand the way a man raises a hand on a Tuesday. The commentary did not have to do anything. I could hear it in the way you hear things in dreams, without words, and there was no reframing in it. Nobody had to explain me. Nobody had to account for anything. Neither of them had to do any work on it — one did not have to find something in it and the other did not have to take something out. It simply went into the record, correctly, and the show moved on. And I stood in the middle of a six-sided cage looking for one person who was startled, and there was nobody, and that is the point at which I woke up. --- WHAT I AM ACTUALLY NOTING I am nought and five. There is not a person alive who assumes I win on Saturday. So a dream in which nobody is surprised is not a dream about winning. It is a dream about already being the kind of fighter whose winning is unremarkable, and I want to be precise about this because precision is the only thing I have that nobody handed me: I do not know whether I want that. I have spent my entire professional life being told I was too raw for somebody's product and then watching them import a woman with a quarter of my experience. Being unremarkable was never available to me. I built everything I have out of being the thing in the room that people had to account for. And in the dream I finally got the result, and the price of it was that I had become ordinary enough for the result to be expected, and I did not enjoy it. I am not saying I would refuse it. I would take it with both hands and so would anybody reading this. I am noting that the version of me that wins easily is a version of me that somebody would have had to build, and nobody has ever built anything for me, and I am twenty-seven years old and I have started to wonder whether that is the boast I have always used it as. --- THE SIX POINTS Two weeks ago I lost, and on my way out I looked at Reyes's wrist for about two seconds. I want to record what I was doing, because people have decided what I was doing and they are wrong. I was counting. Six points. The thing on her arm has six points on it and I counted them on my way to the door with my shoulder not working properly, and what I understood in those two seconds is this: the hold that beat me had a shape before it ever touched me. It was designed. She did not find it in there. She brought it in with her, finished, and then went and found the arm. I have never in my life brought anything into a cage finished. I go. That is the entire method and I have never pretended otherwise and it has taken me to the top ten percent of every room I have ever walked into and it has taken me to nought and five in this one. Both of those are true at once and anybody who needs one of them to cancel the other is not paying attention. I am not asking anyone to teach me anything. I want that said plainly, because there is a version of this paragraph that is a request and this is not it. I am noting that I saw a designed thing and recognised it as designed, which two years ago I would not have done. --- DRUMMOND The fact I have to sit with, and I will put it on the page rather than around it: At Behind Closed Doors 10, Lacey Drummond was in La Telaraña at five anchors and got out of it with a headbutt. At Behind Closed Doors 12, I was in it at six and did not. The comfortable version is that she is better than me at that specific moment and that is why she is six and two and I am nought and five. I have gone over the tape and the comfortable version is not the honest one, and I would rather have the honest one, so: Reyes paused. At ten she paused for half a second to confirm the last arm and that half-second is the door Drummond went through. At twelve she did not pause. There was no door. I tapped three times, hard, on purpose, because I am proud and I am not stupid. So the comparison is not clean, and I am not going to use it, and I am not going to let anybody use it on my behalf either. What is clean is this. Drummond has been in that division since the start, has held the belt, has been beaten twice, and both times she came back and made somebody pay for it. That is not a thing I can be sarcastic about. I have watched her tape properly, the way I now watch everything, and she is better than her reputation and her reputation is good. She is also the second name on a list of eight I filed in public, and this is how the list gets shorter. --- ONE THING FOR THE RECORD, AND IT IS NOT A COMPLAINT There is a rule now. Nothing goes on the card at PROOF unless somebody stands up and says a name out loud, in the building, where people can hear it, and the person named says yes the same way. I named eight women. Publicly. In writing. On this platform, where anybody could read it, and eight of them presumably did. It does not count. I have read the rule twice and it does not count, because I named a category and the rule requires a person, and because writing is not the same as standing up, and because nobody answered and I never gave anybody a way to. I want it noted that I understand the difference and that I am irritated by it, and that being irritated by a rule is not the same as thinking the rule is wrong. It is a good rule. It is the only rule in this company that I have not been able to find the edge of. I am not doing it tonight. --- LAST Five losses. Doctrine, Ó'Súilleabháin, Fallon, DuHast, Reyes. A technician, a hardcore veteran, a high-flyer, a powerhouse, and a submission specialist. Five different disciplines. Five different ways to be beaten. And not one of those five has beaten me twice, because not one of them has come back for a second look. That is not a winning record and I am not going to dress it as one. It is a record of a woman that five separate specialists solved once and then declined to solve again. Nobody else in that division has been in a cage with Pagan DuHast. That is still true. It will still be true on Sunday. --- Sonhei que ganhava e ninguém se surpreendeu. Na próxima vez, quero o barulho. I dreamed I won and nobody was surprised. Next time I want the noise. CAMILA FERREIRA DIAMANTE