I slept last night … if it really counts as sleep when your body simply refuses to remain awake any longer and dumps you into a few hours of oblivion that is.

It is strange, each night the last thing I remember is the radio on in the background as I allow my body to give into gravity as it falls onto the mattress in the darkened room, and the next thing I know I find myself awake.

It is invariably ten or twenty minutes before the alarm is due to go off and there is usually the feeling of isolation and paranoia that grips me as for the briefest of seconds I remember nothing, I don’t know where I am … or even who I am.

Then as the unforgiving sunlight breaks through the gaps in the blinds that cover the window to assault my eyes it all comes flooding back to me.

Crashing back.

.., and once more I know who I am.

I remember everything that has passed, everything that has led me to this time and place, every moment that I have lived.

Every waking moment that is.

The realm of sleep, the time when my body shuts down as it reaches it’s absolute limits and has to attain a fugue state to sort through all the events that my mind has processed … attain this state or I would go mad I have been told by those ever so clever and self important people in the medical profession.

Go mad?

Nice to know that according to them that is still a journey I have yet to take, I mean there was me thinking that perhaps it was a destination that I knew far too well.

I digress though.

For whatever reason … a medical practicality to protect me from my own ever working mind … a simple matter of too much information in one small place, namely my brain … or perhaps my own preferred choice that it is some form of cosmic joke at work … while I am able to recall with the utmost clarity every thing that I have ever done, everything that I have ever seen, everything that I have ever heard

… everything …

… while I am awake, my dreams are lost to me.

In those few hours that I succumb to every two or three days of my life where oblivion claims it’s hold over me I know nothing at all, my dreams … if I dream at all … are not mine to recall when I claw my way back to what passes as my life and start the self-replicating journey once more.

Nothing changes you see, nothing important that is.

I fall into oblivion one moment, and wake up the next, getting out of bed and starting my mantra once more.

There is something about getting out of bed during the winter months that I hate though … hate is perhaps too strong a word, too strong an emotion considering that I have long since ensured that emotions are something that I refuse to bother myself with.

If I cannot have the dreams, if I cannot have the life, if I cannot have the attachment to the things that I am unable to remember then why encumber myself with meaningless feelings that do not help to break me free of the chains that try their best to drag me down out of this world to somewhere new?

Weird isn’t it?

I mean admittedly I find no joy in life, it is simply something that happens to us all as we wait to die, but even knowing that I refuse to give in to anything that would change the status quo.

It is my life, and I will live it my way.

… more than that I will fight it my way to.

I sleep with the window open … one of the few things that I cannot explain actually, considering that I ‘hate’ the cold but I cannot seem to allow myself to sleep in a room that is totally shut off from the outside, shut off from the past … and as a result the bedroom gets quite chilly.

It snowed during the night and, for the first time in a long time there was frost on the inside of the window.

I remember various tales from the older generations about heating a thruppeny bit on the stove and holding it against the window to make a pattern in the frost.

I have a few old coins stashed away from the pre-decimal days … in the time when base and precious metals still made up part of their make-up, so that they had some inherent value instead of just a face and a number to make us believe that what we held was actually worth something … so I was holding a sixpence in a pair of tongs over the naked flames that I had fired up in the long neglected fireplace as the sun came up this morning just to prove a point.

In years to come I will be able to tell the same tale to small and unbelieving children about how cold it was.

Fantastic.

My contribution to the education of the children who are supposedly ‘our future’ will be to tell them that when you place a lump of heated metal to the inside of a window coated in frost you get the tracings of a spider’s web, a dreamcatcher if you will, that moves as if with a life of it’s own across the glass, scraping it’s way along as if it knows where it is going.

… so much more romantic than going into the physical reasons for this happened, and explaining the chemical reactions that take place to form this act.

I could tell them that if I wished to, I have it in my head.

… that assumes that I want to tell them anything at all, romantic or factual.

I could even tell them the truth that as I held the coin in the fire my mind drifted off to think about the fact that for the first time in a very long time I made a decision that seems to have no merit, no baring on my life, no raison d’etre so to speak.

I decided to don the garb of a warrior, to listen to the cheers of the oh so excited fans, and to compete with modern day gladiators in what passes for an arena these days.

Oh joy is me, I am a professional wrestler.

A modern day messiah in a world that no longer follows icons of faith, instead putting their trust and love into colourful matadors who face each other rather than a wild bull pushed beyond it’s limits of pain and endurance.

I wonder though, what they will actually think when I step foot into the ring for the first time with the place that is called WWA?

Will they be expecting a flashy showman in cloth spun of gold and red, espousing epitaphs and wisdom about prayers and vitamins?

Will they be expecting a figure from myth who walks the land of the dead with mystical powers?

Maybe they will be expecting an unstoppable monster who feels no pain?

I just hope that they are expecting to be disappointed, as the truth is that I am none of the above, I am just me, just Ember, and while it is true that part of me feels no pain, that is not because I am unstoppable or a monster.

It is simply because I am past caring about pain, pretty much past caring about anything.

So the path to WWA is nothing more than simple ennui … as the men behind the campaign behind that refreshing soft drink state, “what’s the worst that can happen?”

So all I can say to the fans who are probably expecting some form of hero is to look elsewhere for someone to follow, I am not that man.

To the people who make money from the so called ‘superstars’ within the WWA all I can say is look elsewhere for your cash cow, because if you back me or put your faith in my ability to sell merchandise you will son be much poorer for your belief.

… and to the men that I will be facing in this first step in my journey … to Aidan DeLaCroix, the man who will step foot in the ring assuming that his oh so scary rantings on demons, ghosts and things that go bump in the night gives him the advantage in this battle … I have little to say only a few words of either advice or comfort for you.

You want to try to put out the fire before you have even felt it’s heat … you want to bank the embers of my desire and let your shadows devour them … you want my end?

Well then your course is clear my friend, and all that you need do can be summed up in one word.

Try

… actually there is another word that goes with it, now that I think about it, and it is one that I simply love the sound of as it rolls off my tongue.

… fail.

Beat me … defeat me … end me?

Try Aidan, try and fail.

You see I may become known or perceived as an enigma among some people you know, but I am a simple man, and the truth is this.

I am not here for glory, I am not here for pride and I am most certainly not here for Aidan DeLaCroix.

What am I here for?

A very good question.

When I want you to know I will tell you.

For now though it is time to find out if I am the bull or the matador in this match, am I the man standing in the arena taking on the wild bull for nothing more than empty vainglorious boasting rights

… or am I the bull itself, the force of nature, simply doing what it has to do, not questioning, not knowing, just doing?

More good questions, and yet again no answers.

For perhaps I am neither … perhaps I am something else entirely?

Just like it seemed that there were only two possible answers to placing the heated coin on the frosted window to see what happened.

Was it going to be the romantic tale of how the dreamcatcher made it’s way across the glass, or was it going to be the clinical explanation of how heat and cold react together to form lines of stress?

Neither.

… how about the fact that a little too much pressure with a coin heated just a little too resulted in an implosion of glass and noise as the window shattered, leaving me standing there with my arm through the remains of what was once glass and was now nothing but a memory.

Such symmetry there, if you only care to see it.

A bit like me.

… a bit like the ashes that lay in the hearth, the flames died down as I reminisce here with you, the heat gone from them, nothing left.

Until you stoke them up, until you breathe new life on them, until from the ashes the fire grows once more.

The embers begin to burn.

… more symmetry?

Perhaps.

Or maybe I am just cold.