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youssefguedira · 1 year

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missing fencing worlds so have this (set in a slightly different version of my regular fencing au but everyone's weapons are still the same)

Joe makes it to the final.

He beats the standing world champion 13-15, after a video review called by the Hungarian team – and they'd both been holding their breath as they waited for the result, Joe's heart beating so hard it felt like it was going to burst out of his chest – didn't succeed in getting the referee to award his opponent the point instead, and Joe makes it to the final. He's never made it this far before. Nobody on his team has made it this far in years. His hands are still shaking while he watches the bronze medal match, Hungary just narrowly beating Japan for the bronze.

When he checks his phone, there's a text waiting from Andy. Italy pulled silver in team. We saw the semi-final. You got this, Joe.

And from Nicky, simply: In bocca al lupo.

Joe doesn't get a chance to respond before his coach calls him over, and he turns his phone off and sets it aside.

He's not sure he fully believes what's happening – he's in a World Championships final – until he's walking back onto the piste, new sword in hand, trying to get himself back under control. He's already come incredibly far just to be here, as his coach reminds him before the match starts. All he has to do now is his best.

The first two points go to his opponent: French, currently ranked second in the world to Joe's 16th, a nice enough guy on the few occasions Joe's had to meet him. One of them is simply skill, the other is an oversight on Joe's part, and when the bout resumes Joe grits his teeth and forces himself to concentrate. It's nothing he hasn't done before in training. He can do this.

The next point is his, a neat hit to his opponent's wrist just as the other is starting to attack. Joe dodges away before his opponent's hit can land and the referee calls halt. He gets two more, then loses one, then manages another at the very end, a point that initially goes to his opponent but is turned over when Joe's coach calls for a video review and wins. She's got a sharp eye for that kind of thing. The first round ends 4-5 in Joe's favour.

The break isn't long enough for him to do more than have a quick drink and talk briefly to his coach, but when he looks over at the area where the rest of his team is watching, Nicky is there too. He's out of his kit by now, wearing a plain black hoodie and jeans instead of his team jacket. He catches Joe's eye right before the minute is up and offers him a small, reassuring smile.

(The rest of the team have never really asked about what Nicky is to Joe, and Joe's never volunteered the information, even if he's fairly sure most of them have caught on. None of them have ever showed any overt approval or disapproval – it's just something they don't discuss – but the fact that they're letting Nicky sit with them now is a show of support that makes him feel… he's not quite sure, yet, and he doesn’t have the time now to think about it.)

The start of the second round is better for him, at least, and he gets three points up in the first 30 seconds, all three just slightly too quick for his opponent to catch him in time. It's his main strength, and he knows it. But then his opponent gets one, and it breaks Joe's rhythm enough for him to lose another, and another, and another. He manages to get four in the end, but loses the round 4-6. It could be worse. It could be much worse.

"Don't lose your head, Joe," his coach tells him during the second break. "This is just another bout, understand? You can do this." He nods, once, and his coach claps him on the back. "Get out there and finish this."

Joe changes sword for the last round, so they have to re-test. His heart is racing, enough that he has to take slow, measured breaths in an attempt to settle it down. His coach is right: this is nothing he hasn't done a thousand times before. If he doesn't think about the stakes, this could be any other bout.

They're at 10 to 9 going into the last round, which is much better than Joe had ever dreamed of doing. As long as he stays he's focused, he has a chance, and that's what he thinks about as he pulls his mask on and steadies himself.

He starts by feinting an attack to the head and dropping his blade at the last second to hit his opponent's flank instead, which evens out the score, at least. The second goes to his opponent, Joe's parry coming just too late to block the attack. But then he gets the next two, and he's in the lead.

On the fourth point, they both hit: Joe's certain it's his, but the referee awards it to his opponent instead. His coach calls for a video review that doesn't change anything.

The fight goes on until they're both at 14 points in total. Whoever gets the next one will win, and Joe – Joe can do this.

He starts out fast, careful to make sure he is the one with the right of way going into the attack, and his opponent lunges but Joe steps back just enough that the sword misses and then he ripostes before his opponent can recover, and the light goes off, and the referee calls it, and the bout is over, and Joe wins.

Behind him, the rest of his team is cheering; the stands are, too, more people than he's ever fenced in front of before. He's certain he's shaking all over as he takes his mask off, as he fumbles with his bodywire and has to try three times to get the damn thing unplugged – his opponent is still standing there as if in shock – eventually his coach comes over to the piste to help him with the wire and set his sword to one side before she embraces him, saying something he can't quite make out over the roar of the stands, and then the rest of his team are surrounding him, all speaking at once, all clapping him on the back and hugging him and laughing, and he's certain there are tears in his eyes.

Then Nicky's there, too, hugging him tight and laughing. "World champion, Joe!" he half-shouts just to be heard, and Joe's half laughing, half crying as Nicky sways them both back and forth. When Nicky pulls back, he cups the back of Joe's neck, and Joe wants to kiss him so badly he aches but he can't, not here with all these people watching, with the cameras that are almost certainly still focused on him, because he won – so Nicky pulls him back in again, kisses his cheek before stepping away completely but staying close.

Then Joe has to go so they can set up the stadium for the medal ceremony, goes from the chaos of the main stadium to the quiet of the changing room, where the rest of the team congratulate him again before leaving him to take a moment to himself before the medal ceremony.

Alone, in the changing room, Joe calls his mother.

She picks up on the second ring. "Yusuf!" she cries excitedly, and Joe smiles even though she can't see it.

"Mama," he says, voice shaking just a bit. "Did you see?"

"I saw, I saw," his mother says. "I'm so proud of you, habibi."

Joe almost starts crying in earnest at that, manages to hold it back just enough to be able to speak. They don't talk for long – Joe is called back out for the medal ceremony a few minutes later – but his mother makes him promise to call again soon, when they can talk properly.

Joe does cry at the medal ceremony, unable to properly hold it in anymore, must look like a mess when the national anthem starts, manages to just about compose himself enough for the picture they take of him with his medal and his Champion du Monde certificate which he barely manages to hold still, his hands are shaking so badly. The team surrounds him again after the picture, all talking over him too quickly for him to process what they're saying, but they let him go after a little while with a promise to celebrate properly tomorrow, when the tournament ends.

He stops off at his hotel room just long enough to shower and change and check his phone (just a text from Nicky, reading We're at Andy's – see you soon.) He leaves the certificate but takes the medal with him, knows they'll all want to see it. Andy's team is on the floor above his, so it doesn't take long before he's outside the door.

Nicky is the one who lets him in before Joe's even had a chance to finish knocking, grins at him widely and tugs him inside by the hand, kicks the door shut behind him. Before Joe even has a chance to speak, Nicky presses him back against the door and kisses him the way he hadn't been able to earlier, long and slow like they've got all the time in the world, one hand cupping Joe's jaw to keep him steady, the other slipping under Joe's shirt to rest on the small of his back. Joe melts into it, looping his arms around Nicky's neck, and it feels like forever they stand there and at the same time it's barely a heartbeat before Nicky pulls back but doesn't, letting Joe rest his head on Nicky's shoulder instead. He doesn't say a word when Joe starts crying again, just strokes his hand over Joe's curls, kisses his temple and holds him tight.

"I told you you could do it, didn't I?" Nicky murmurs. "You owe me, now."

It's true – he'd bet Joe when they both arrived in Cairo that this would be his year, finally. Joe laughs, and it comes out sounding a little like a sob.

Evidently, the grace period afforded to them by the others ends then, because Nile appears in the doorway to the rest of the suite and nudges Nicky out of the way before hugging him so tight he almost can't breathe. "That was incredible, Joe!"

"Thank you, thank you," Joe says, laughing. Nicky watches them both with a soft, fond smile as Nile pulls back and leads him by the hand into the suite's sitting room where the others are waiting: Quynh and Andy in one of the armchairs, Quynh perched on the armrest with Andy's arm around her waist keeping her steady; Booker on the other with Lykon sitting in the middle of the floor. Joe takes the couch amid the excited chattering of the others, and Nicky sits down beside him, lifting his arm to let Joe curl into his side without being asked. Nile sits on Joe's other side, resting her legs against his.

"We saw the whole thing," Quynh says. "That last point was beautiful, Joe." Andy nods her agreement, and Nicky squeezes Joe's hand. Joe's grinning so wide it hurts.

"Show us the medal, then," Nile says. Joe obliges.

It's Nile's second Worlds, this year: she's the newest addition to their group, having narrowly beaten Andy for the silver medal after making it onto the US team for winning the college league. She's one of the favourites to win in women's individual foil, even above Andy, and they'll all be rooting for her tomorrow. The US team's already taken bronze in the team competition, losing against Andy's team to make it to the final. She's doing well this year.

"We knew you could do it," Lykon said. "France didn't have a chance. No offence, Book."

"None taken," Booker says good-naturedly, but immediately negates it by adding, "We'll beat you tomorrow anyway."

"Like hell you will," Lykon says. "I already beat you once, old man, I'll do it again."

"And that's tomorrow's problem," Andy announces loudly to cut off any arguments before they get going. "Tonight is for Joe, you two."

Joe loves them all so, so much. Andy produces a bottle of sparkling grape juice from the suite's minifridge, because they don't drink alcohol in the group anymore, both for Joe's sake and especially since Booker's return. She pours it out into the shitty plastic champagne flutes from the pack she'd brought with her when they arrived, anticipating this very scenario, and hands each one of them a glass.

"To the new world champion, then," she says then, smiling as she lifts her glass. "We're proud of you, Joe."

Joe doesn't trust himself to speak, so he just smiles as the rest of them echo her before they drink. After, Nicky kisses the top of his head, whispers, "I love you," quiet enough that the others can't quite hear, already bickering about one thing or another, and in that moment Joe is the happiest he's ever been.

#neon writes #fencing au #But Slightly Different This Time #this one may be fencing words heavy because i forget what is obvious and what is not oops #in terms of teams / other stuff:#tunisia does have a fencing team but they didn't get super far this year (cairo). i do what i want though #italy men's foil i think won the team competition this year. but again i edited things slightly #quynh wins gold in individual and team women's sabre #lykon and booker win gold and silver in individual épée respectively #i have more thoughts ive just forgotten them #userlinax #userlyde #the old guard #kaysanova #forgot to use main tags. im a fool

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blizzardsuplex · 10 months

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“like watching art in motion” (an essay on ZSJ and wrestling)

CW: discussions of gatekeeping

I didn’t have internet for over three days, and so in my total boredom I opened up my Microsoft Word and began tinkering with a “casual essay” on my favorite wrestler, Zack Sabre Jr. But I can’t talk about Zack without talking about how I feel about and my experiences with pro wrestling as a whole, so over 3.2k words later, here we are.

(I didn’t mean it to get so long...nor, in truth, get so personal. I’ve been carrying this with me for a long time, though, so I guess it had to come out eventually. Things like that always do.)

Title from a comment I saw on Reddit about Zack in 2016. Content under the cut. Special thanks to @heartsinablender/Izzy, who encouraged me to write and eventually post this in semi-public. :)

~~~~

My absolute earliest memories of professional wrestling are of reading next to my favorite uncle while he watched early to mid-2000s era Smackdown on one of those old, boxy TVs, but my first formative memory related to it is talking to one of my classmates, an enthusiastic prowres fan in the way children can be, on the stands by the soccer field during P.E. I don’t remember how the conversation started, but eventually (as it usually did) it landed on the object of his interest.

“I watch wrestling, sometimes,” I threw out, having at that point probably paid attention to a grand total of less than an hour of WWE. His eyes grew wide, then narrowed.

“Yeah?” he said. “Name ten wrestlers.”

He’d said it in a way that felt final, like he was sure that I wouldn’t be able to answer his challenge. It lit a fire under me, and I said “The Undertaker” as quick as a slap. He was unfazed, however, and all too soon I faltered: “The Great Khali, John Cena, Triple H, Booker T…uh. The Great Khali—“

“You said him twice,” my classmate said smugly. He turned away from me, back to the soccer game.

I don’t remember what I replied to the side of his face or what I did immediately after; it didn’t matter. I’d already failed the test, and no matter how biased its giver was, the fact I’d proven him right sucked.

~~~~

This is an essay about how I feel about the professional wrestler Zack Sabre Jr. This is also, if the above hasn’t clued you in, an essay about my personal history and relationship with professional wrestling. These ideas are not only closely related but intertwined, two vines. As with anything alive, both have their periods of growth and withering, fecundity and barrenness, somewhat independent of each other but in the end—as with any ecosystem—affecting the very same, sometimes in dramatic ways.

But even the strongest vines need something to wrap around if they ever hope to reach the sun. Where did these find their base?—my very body, frail as it is compared to the kinds of people who take up the path of the wrestler. That’s the funny thing about entertainment, I’ve found: the people you watch, whether on stage or in ring or on a screen, seem like invincible titans…as long as you’re watching them. The minute you turn your eyes away, they start to wilt; when you turn your back, they wither. With enough lack of care (in every sense), anyone could tear off the leaves and stems and just leave.

I could leave. I’ve almost left. Certainly I’ve drifted away from it on occasion. But so far I’ve always come back, or maybe more precisely I’ve let those vines wind and wind and wind ‘round me again, and more often than not ZSJ—what he represents to my conception of wrestling—is to blame.

~~~~

After I had tried and failed at the task of naming ten wrestlers, I remember feeling embarrassed. Now—though for a completely different reason—I feel outright ashamed. Now, I know too intimately what eight-year-old me could only barely comprehend: why he had issued that challenge in the first place. I was a girl, and I was an unathletic twig, and I was the most bookish of nerds, and while one or even two of those traits might have been acceptable in a “real fan”…all three of those things? Never. A classic example of gatekeeping—and for a while mentally that one interaction was successful at keeping me out.

But at the time it was “just” embarrassment, and as much as I hate to admit it that feeling followed me even after I began actually watching WWE with my uncle and cousin. Dipping your toes into any new activity or hobby, especially one with the amount of layers pro wrestling does, is daunting enough without the constant fear of somehow being discovered and kicked out of that space before my time, though of course my family wouldn’t do that—or, worse, laughed at, which they might’ve. The fact that my cousin was a year younger than me but, at least at first, knew more than I did didn’t really help: she never gatekept, but how she took every chair shot and dick kick we watched in stride (it was during Christian’s feud with Randy Orton) while I was left scratching my head a bit made me feel, as with my classmate, like a poser.

Well, I didn’t want to be a poser anymore, so I went to that great well of information: the internet. Specifically, I went on TV Tropes (yeah, I know) and read the pages on professional wrestling and WWE; while I was aware that there were other promotions, especially after reading the former—I remember the promotion name Ring of Honor getting a cool! from me—I wasn’t interested in anything but the “basics” at that point. What was a heel, a face, a tweener? What did it mean when someone did a shoot on another? What even was the Attitude Era, and why did people like it so much (a question that to this day I’m not sure I can answer)?

I got those down in a reasonable amount of time. Then, something interesting began to happen: I felt compelled to keep reading more about it. I honestly don’t remember the specifics—which names, memes, and tragedies (always in a WWF/WWE context) my brain absorbed like a sponge. All I know is that, after a couple of months, I ended up quite a bit like a smark. So I did get what I wanted: no longer did I feel like a fake fan, even if it came at the cost of somewhat alienating my cousin (who was beginning to lose interest in wrestling) and my uncle.

That wasn’t the most interesting thing I got out of my wiki walking days, though. Because of my (in truth middling-depth) dive into (a very narrow slice of) the prowres ocean, 12 to 13-year-old me thought I had figured this whole professional wrestling thing out: it was bright, it was flashy, it was written like a soap opera. It was entertaining, sometimes off of sheer cringe-inducing antics and sometimes out of sheer spectacle. What counted as spectacle, meanwhile?—the flippiest of flips, dramatic kickouts, muscled people billed at two whole feet taller than me hollering at each other in the ring. It was violent (but not too much, for the sponsors’ sake) and it was slickly produced and it had the best kind of nonsensical internal logic.

Of course, that is what wrestling is…sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with that, or anything wrong with watching wrestling like that, either. My mistake as a child was putting it in a box, thinking that everything I just said was everything it could and can be. I was lukewarm on the idea of prowres presented more sport-like, didn’t know how it could be entertaining without a writer’s room’s worth of storylines. As for pro wrestling being art, or even just beautiful—those two concepts seemed so far apart that to use the word never even crossed my mind.

~~~~

So stayed my thoughts on it until, when I was maybe 13 or 14, I fell head-first into hipsterdom (in the “wanting to like things before they were cool” sense). It happened with music, it happened with video games, and it happened with wrestling. Though I still watched WWE, I began to look beyond its borders—which is to say I began paying attention to trope examples by wrestlers I wasn’t familiar with. Those entries, along with a few well-placed links to 240p YouTube videos, were how I found my first favorite wrestler…who was, of all people, Chuck Taylor (who I still love, don’t get me wrong).

But wrestling news moves fast—even faster than the editors at early 2010s TV Tropes, and especially those editors who cared about keeping an independent wrestler’s page up to date. I knew that, if I wanted to know more about Chuckie T and his Gentleman’s Club, I would have to look elsewhere.

I found two places: a wrestling forum literally just called Wrestling Forum, and a newish subreddit called /r/squaredcircle. I proceeded to lurk on both, but it was on Reddit a year or so later that I found the post that ended up being the catalyst for my wrestling fandom from that point forward—a mention that Chuck Taylor wrestled at this supposedly really cool promotion called Pro Wrestling Guerrilla during their yearly Battle of Los Angeles, and that the footage of that show was finally out.

I don’t know when I found the time to look for it. When I think back to that Saturday afternoon, navigating with no adblock to a sketchy wrestling stream archive on a desktop already considered ancient, all I remember is how curious I was when—after giving it a couple of minutes to buffer—I finally pressed play.

~~~~

The match, if you want to find it yourself, is the Friends of Low Moral Fiber (Kenny Omega, Chuck Taylor, and Zack Sabre Jr.) versus the Young Bucks and Adam Cole from BOLA 2014 Night 1. Back then, every single one of those names were established or rising players in the independent scene; now, of course, they’ve all been in multiple top-level promotions around the world. For this and several other reasons, I haven’t been able to watch that contest back before, just last year, I found it in its entirety on YouTube. The channel quickly got taken down, but not before I snagged a copy for myself; in fact, I made the effort to get it as soon as I saw it was the real deal. As someone once told me, pro wrestling is one of the most ephemeral of entertainment forms—and also I don’t have the money for both a DVD player and to ship from the US to watch it legitimately.

But I wasn’t thinking about that when I was 14 or 15 years old. At the time, the only person I really knew or cared about in that match was Chuck, and so as the introductions happened I eagerly awaited his time in the ring (even back then, I held the opinion that he was an underrated worker). Instead, his team first fielded the skinny man with the Union Jack jacket, the one who’d gotten right into the other side’s faces. Zack Sabre Jr., I recalled as everyone got into their corners. A cool name, if a little overwrought.

The bell rang. Twenty-four minutes later, I paused the video and spent hours searching that “overwrought” name everywhere, looking for more clips of him, more discussion on him—more of his wrestling.

~~~~

What can I say about Zack Sabre Jr. in the context of wrestling that probably hasn’t already been said a million times? He has an atypical build for a wrestler, especially before his recent bulk up: tall but very lean—or outright skinny if you’re feeling uncharitable. His promo style is one I have seen called “extremely British” and “hilariously unhinged” (which, considering everything happening in the UK, maybe mean the same thing). He has some pretty sick taste in indie entrance themes. And, of course, he is considered one of the best technical wrestlers in the world—maybe of all time, and certainly in this generation.

To me, though, he is (simply, encompassingly) my favorite wrestler, and upon watching that BOLA match back it isn’t necessarily because I was wowed by the smoothness of his technique (though I was) or impressed by his underrated speed (though I was) or even in awe of his flexibility (though I definitely was—and here I shout out Adam Cole for helping make Zack’s first in-ring impression such a memorable one). No; it was because, for the very first time, I realized professional wrestling wasn’t cut and dry, contained within the box I had tried to place it in.

Read what I described my younger self’s conception of prowres to be…or, if you prefer, think back to the height of PG era WWE. To my mind, wrestling was supposed to almost overwhelm, saturate the senses. Wrestling was bright, flashy, melodramatic, violent—loud.

The footage I watched that day was loud, too; even through the shitty speakers and video quality, it was clear that the Reseda faithful knew how to have a good fucking time. But whenever Zack was in the ring, it was quiet—sometimes literally, but I more mean in movement, in intent. He convinced me from the first lock up that he was absolutely focused on how he could twist his body and how he could turn his opponent’s, that he aware of and could manipulate every single joint and muscle and ligament offered to him. He convinced me that it was, at that moment, all he cared about. It was still violence, of course; all his graceful movements were in service of hurting another. But it was an elegant violence, a quiet violence.

Pro wrestling, the profession of machismo and posturing, could be quiet. Who knew? Before I saw Zack wrestle, I didn’t, and nor did I ever consider the logical question to ask after: if it could be quiet—the complete opposite of what I thought it was—what else was it? What else might it become?

Beautiful, maybe?

I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Whether wrestling is art is a discussion I leave to people with far more time and far more knowledge of aesthetics than I do. What I do know is this: I not only put it in the wrong box, I was wrong to put it in a box. Professional wrestling is no dead thing, no solved problem—it was, and is, alive, and at its best exists as a creative medium with so many possibilities. Sure, we all have our preferences, and prowres has space for loudness, almost deafening; but it has space for the quiet as well.

~~~~

It would be one thing if ZSJ was a flash in the pan, someone who rose in the business just far enough to get a handful of PWG bookings before fizzling out. If that were the case, I suppose I could expound on the point about prowres being ephemeral, say something that would amount to “the world may have moved on from him, but I’ll never forget how he opened my eyes all those years ago”. But that would be both extremely disingenuous and, to be honest, make a worse narrative. That one match made me understand wrestling more; following Zack’s career afterwards made me love it.

A not insignificant part to this is the fact I hitched my cart to a damn good horse—if Zack was good in 2014, he got even better as the years went by. While he was always a joy to see work, once he improved at selling in particular (which I never thought he was horrible at, mind, but watching early tapes back you can tell the difference), his matches went from baseline good to great; who doesn’t enjoy watching ZSJ crumple and ragdoll around the ring these days? Yet another big reason I am genuinely grateful for his wrestling is far beyond him: ZSJ was my passport to the rest of the wrestling world. Through him, I discovered so many promotions, so many other amazing wrestlers. There was PWG, of course—tying Mike Bailey into knots in the finals of a BOLA, making Chris Hero’s finger bleed, going to war with Roderick Strong over the belt. There was him countering Will Ospreay’s top rope move into a triangle choke that one Wrestlemania weekend. It was him who put me on to European wrestling, with WxW and RevPro and everyone else. His fight with Negro Casas was the first time I’d seen a mat-based lucha match. And, of course, without him I wouldn’t have started watching New Japan, and without New Japan I would’ve never seen any of the amazing people that make up the puro and/or joshi scene.

I always, always come back to Zack himself, though, it’s true. And maybe, some might suggest, it’s at least partly out of a mix of nostalgia and novelty—he was the first wrestler I paid attention to that looked different and wrestled different from what I considered the norm. When I’m put in a hyperfocused trance by the quiet of his matches, past and present, perhaps it’s just my subconscious, somehow, paying respect to how he made that young teen feel.

My answer to that is…well, maybe a little. But ZSJ doesn’t coast by on that alone—he is continually improving, continually striving to improve, and I couldn’t be happier that he’s getting his due. And, like with professional wrestling itself, I find happiness in that match from 2014 (almost a decade ago, now!) not only out of a sense of nostalgia, or even its own sake, but because it’s proof of what Zack Sabre Jr. was and has now become.

~~~~

A trio of ZSJ-related anecdotes to round things off:

1.) When I was in late high school, I did a school project on professional wrestling. The local guy I interviewed was honestly pretty gracious, but something he said nagged at me. “Pro wrestling,” he tried to explain to me, even before I said anything about what I watched, “isn’t just like WWE.” I know, I wanted to reply. My favorite wrestler is Zack Sabre Jr. I watch mostly American indies. Why are you assuming that I don’t know that?—but it would have come across indignant, and so I held my tongue.

2.) A few months later, I wrote a post on Facebook on why I liked pro wrestling, inspired by my discovery of Barthes’ essay on it in his Mythologies. My old classmate, the one who gatekept me when we were both eight, saw it—and he not only liked it, not only commented positively on it, but even DMed me. “Who’s your favorite wrestler?” he asked me. “Zack Sabre Jr.,” I said. He then proceeded to approve, saying that he was great in the Cruiserweight Classic; he was then surprised when I said I’d been following his career for a while even before that.

3.) When my older sister and I were in the women’s section of the Tokyo Dome during Wrestle Kingdom 14 Night 1, we ended up sitting next to and chatting with an Australian lady who got into NJPW because of her boyfriend (they both really liked Ospreay). When ZSJ came down to the ring, I heard her say encouragingly to me “that’s your Zack”. I’m not sure if I’d ever say he’s mine, but that was the night, maybe even the moment, that the very beginnings of this essay were born: when I realized how much he’d influenced at least this part of my life. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to jump down fifteen rows of seats and shake his hand, tell him even a little what his performances meant to me.

But that was not the time for that; three years later I still haven’t found the time for it, living where I do. Instead, I ended up, and end up, just sitting in my chair, screaming wordlessly at the top of my lungs, and watching him wrestle.

#mel's writing tag #zack sabre jr #man if anyone reads this whole super self-indulgent thing...thanks!#and even if not...#thanks to my mutuals who've made tumblr a safe place to post this

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