One Match

ONE MATCH Notes. Written down so I keep them straight. Not for anyone. ———————————————— Only one match this time. Used to write these when I had two to keep separate in my head. Tonight there's just the one, and it's still taking up the whole page. Read what Bríd wrote this morning. Federation published it same as the other two. I want to answer some of it here, on paper, before I answer any of it in the cage, because I have learned that the two answers need to be worked out separately or they come out wrong together. ———————————————— She's right that the letters weren't the conversation. I knew that when I drove to Lubbock and took the picture instead of calling her. A phone call would have been the actual conversation, and I wasn't ready to have it yet, so I sent a photograph of a building instead and called it correspondence. She did the same thing back — a letter, then a broadcast handshake, still not the thing itself. Two people who both know exactly how to hit somebody and neither of us picked up a phone. I'll let other people decide what that says about either of us. Tomorrow it's the cage. She's right about that too. It's the only room either of us has ever actually finished a sentence in. ———————————————— THE RULES Same as always. Writing them down again because the opponent changes but the list doesn't. - Nothing aimed at the face with a weapon. - Nothing aimed at the throat with a weapon. - Nothing after the bell past a reasonable count. - Nothing pulled in on an innocent. I want to note something about tomorrow specifically, because it's the first time in fifteen years this list has meant something different going in. Every time I've read this list out to myself before a match, it's been because the man across the cage either doesn't have one or hasn't earned the right yet to be trusted with one. Rancid has none. The kid hadn't been tested. This time the list is walking in across from another list. Bríd has her own version of these four lines, drawn her own way, for her own reasons, over more years than I've been doing this. Tomorrow isn't me holding a line against somebody who doesn't have one. It's two lines, in the same room, for the first time either of us has had that. I don't know what that changes about the match. I don't think it makes it safer. If anything I think it makes it more honest, which isn't the same thing. ———————————————— THE THIRD THING She asked whether it can be passed down. Wrote out her answer — that you can't hand somebody a chosen line in a letter, you can only let them watch it get chosen, in public, by somebody they already have a reason to watch. My daughter in the seat. That part. I want to write down where I agree with her and where I don't, because I don't think I fully agree, and I'd rather work that out on paper than pretend I signed off on the whole thing. I agree that a line can't be handed over in words. I tried handing mine to a training partner once, in words, before I had cause to believe he needed it as urgently as I did. It didn't take. He didn't have the thing that makes a line hold, which is a reason of your own for needing it to hold. Words don't supply that reason. I know that better than most people in this building, and I know exactly what it cost to learn it, and I'm not going to write down here what that was, because I never do. Here's where I don't agree, or don't agree yet. Bríd thinks watching is enough — that my daughter, sitting in that seat tomorrow, sees two people choose a line in public and that sight does the work a lecture can't. I hope she's right. I would like, more than almost anything else in this profession, for her to be right. But the way I learned mine wasn't by watching somebody choose it well. It was by finding out, myself, at full cost, what happens when a line isn't there. I don't know yet whether a person can get the lesson the easy way — from watching — or whether some part of it only ever arrives the hard way, same as it did for me. I hope to God it's the first one. I have some doubt. Maybe that's the actual third thing. Not whether it can be passed down. Whether it can be passed down without the cost attached, or whether the cost is the part that actually teaches it, and all a person watching from the outside gets is a preview of a bill they haven't been handed yet. I don't have the answer. I'm not going to pretend I do just because she wrote hers out clean and mine's coming out messier. Some things you don't get to answer until a lot more years have gone by than either of us has had yet. ———————————————— GENERAL NOTES Body's fine. Hands taped tonight instead of waiting for the building — wanted them right before I had anyone else around to think about, same as she does, apparently, though I didn't know that until she wrote it. Sleep's been short this week. Not going to pretend otherwise. She'll be in the front row. Fifteen years old. I told her she didn't have to come. She said she wasn't going to miss this one. Bell rings, I go to work. That's what I do. Tomorrow the work has a name across the cage that I've written letters to instead of a stranger's. Should have done that a long time ago. Doing it now. — C. B.