A Gladiator Never Fails

How do you feel when you have let yourself down? When you have done a blunder, a mess which is impossible to clean? When the loss is so big that you can't salvage anything out of it? When you let those people down who lived by your successes, those people who relished in your triumph, who had managed to keep their heads up proud through your accomplishments? When the rest of the world looks down at you with malice and contempt, and you feel like a Gladiator who had lost his battle?

When you are an achiever, a winner, people start putting up expectations. They expect you to take positions every time you give an exam, to win the competition every time you participate. They make you look like a God, like some unnatural extraterrestrial being which cannot make errors. They say they 'know' that you are going to win, that you will wipe the floor off with your left hand with your eyes closed. They boast around relating you to them. Suddenly you realize that you are no longer living your own life, rather you are fighting and competing with everybody at everything to put up your self to their expectations so that you can keep on hearing their praises. You are now too scared to veer off the path you created yourself in the beginning. The expectation-induced battles are feeble.They make you vulnerable as you really cannot put yourself to fight for something you don't stand for. This causes your portfolio to drop, your position starts to stagger. You put more efforts in it. Its useless. Your mind doesn't agrees to spend the resources. Your tries are futile, your struggle a waste of time. Things get worse as you wipe sweat of your forehead looking at your empire tumble to heaps, ash cloud of tension and urgency obscures your mind. You double and triple your efforts but it doesn't changes anything. Soon enough you are on the brink of failure. Next moment is the catastrophic one. You finally do it. You lose it. Your series of victories is over. A break has been created. The Gladiator is lying down, face in the ruins of your, finally beaten. He cannot meet the eyes of the spectators, his head weighs a ton now.

The Gladiator beats himself, rams his head against the majestic columns, puts dirt in his hairs, screams, screams and screams till his voice box can't emit another sound. He goes in solitary. He separates himself from the wide world, so that he can punish himself for his loss. He sits for hours, mourning. He surrenders to himself.

You have surrendered to your self. Now your thoughts take a new turn. You want to know what caused it. You ponder for hours, trying to find out which step was misplaced. You perform a self analysis. You discover the error point. You vow to return, to gain back the glory, the position you had. You promise yourself that you will win what was rightfully yours. Full of bright intentions and strong determinations, its a new day now.

The Gladiator returns to the city. He has practiced hard, day and night, in desserts, on ice. He feels his strength return back to his body. His head is no longer bowed, its held proudly, high in the enticing air. He follows the familiar paths to the arena, his arena. His feet leaves deep imprints in the brown grey sand. The atmosphere is inviting, his mind is clear. He enters the enclosure, his heart hammering against his ribs. The crowd cheers for his return. Soon everybody will remember how his blade tasted like. The world is his for taking and the Gladiator is back where he belongs.

"He'll bring them death and they will love him for it"-Gracchus, from the movie Gladiator

The Hunt-A True Story

A deep crimson colored fluid made its way through the sparse growth of hairs on the dirt-covered human flesh to the random collage of mosses, Chir cones, needle-like leaves and wild flowers on the floor of the cold forest. The Pinus roxburghii swayed slowly as if fanning the sole human to the certain upcoming death. The chilly air smelled of gunpowder and old pines with a rare whiff from a decaying carcass lying nearby. A double barrel shotgun laid couple of feet away from the ceasing human body, now cold after expelling a number of shells full of smooth round lead balls some which had ended up in the spotted corpse of the unlucky prey.


The silent breaths of the young human labored as he struggled to live another day, trying to beat the death hovering before his black eyes. Events leading to the unholy moment flashed in his mind, the wrong decisions, the unluckiness, the mistakes. The loneliness hammered against his temple and the silence pierced his ears. He kept asking himself; will he see the daylight?


The hunter was a young male, capable of wonders as well as blunders of enormous proportions. Carrying his faithful weapon, he had entered his death trap sure and confident, hoping to extinguish few flames of roaring lives of the inhuman inhabitants before the sun left its playground. His masterful aim and the unwavering determination pushed him on and on as the death count increased and his luckless preys lay dead on the same ground on which he would be lying himself soon enough. Killing was ecstatic and rebelling, and the pleasure he got from it was unmatched; eternal. Then his luck ran out.


A growl and a swishing sound made his spine stiff as his senses a change in the atmosphere as well as in the stakes. The growl was unique and unforgettable, the infamous mammal. The hunter turned deliberately to look in the eyes of the animal. There was anger, and hunger, he could see that. Those fierce eyes sizing him up, looking for the weak spots, planning the attack. The hunter felt the increasing aggressiveness, automatically steeling his grip on his defense mechanism, slightly raising the shotgun, preparing for the incoming.


Everything had changed. It was not a game anymore, more like a struggle. The forest transformed into an arena, the universe became the spectator.


To Be Continued...

Headphones

You know, I think headphones are the most sympathetic invention for teenagers, at least for me. The satisfaction I get when I pull on my headphones and listen to a high tempo metal or rap song when I am boiling with anger, at a volume so loud that music is blaring out of the headphones successfully blocking all other sounds including words of advice, wise talk, judgments or ‘guidance’, in other words, BULLSHIT, from people around me from whom I want to escape from. That satisfaction is a pure pleasure, the type of pleasure you get when you gulp chilled water after running a mile under a scorching sun or when you hug you someone you love after you have been pulled out of a burning house by a brave fire fighter or when you finally collapse on your warm and cozy bed after days and nights of intense work that simply can’t be done in the time given by your brainless boss. 


Its like drugs, you know, when I put my headphones on, cause it gives me the illusion that I am on top of everything in the whole world, no rude-mouth classmates, no pushy parents, no neighbors who love to peep and spy, no smart-ass teachers who consider students as a second-grade specie, the world is that happy place where everything is perfect and everyone is rich, there is no Guantanamo and no black ops, there are no Taliban and no narrow minded Mullahs, no draughts and no drugs, a world where everyone has rights and everybody is equal, a perfect world. 


Headphones are just a cheap gadget with a body of plastic, bones of a metal and no emotions at all. They are a non-living thing in biological terms, they can’t breath, can’t grow, can’t die, can’t reproduce. The best thing is that they can’t make crude and insulting remarks, they can’t degrade you or spoil you mood every time you feel happy and contended, proud about a recent achievement. They can easily be your best friends in the sense that though they don't have the capability to encourage you, they can't discourage you either. 


I don't think I could live without headphones. I would be a miserable wretch, tired of life and all the 'realities' it offers to its unfortunate subjects, wondering if a suicide was a shortcut out of this shit, living days in scare and nights in despair in a deep deep tunnel of reality with no bright end pouring warm sunlight to inspire and aspire me, filling up the magazine with shiny pointy bullets before stuffing it into the gun with a click every morning to take the breath out of my body with a bang, being an asshole and taking my frustration out on those who are weaker than me, making them hurt to crush my own pain that slices through my heart with a razor sharp edge, shooting birds out of the sky and fishes into the sea, cutting my own wrist to let the warm blood flow out like river flooding of its banks onto the pale land that is my skin, and I really would do it all too. 


You know, I think I owe the person who invented this lifesaver. I owe him for keeping me sane and safe, and for giving me enough strength to let those around me live sanely and safely. I owe you man, I owe you a lot.