Cage Match
Here it goes again.
The battle between whether to stay or to go begins. She didn’t know why, but 9pm seemed to be the favorite hour for internal cage matches. This match would be different, though. The side to stay had some new inventory—a new, spiky ladder, if you will. He has written a song for her. It seemed small and insignificant from someone who wrote songs for a living, but this one was different. This one was for her. She had spent years begging for him to write a song with her as the muse. She felt that, on this occasion, this song was an expression of desire for her that she had never experienced from him before. It was an outreach, an olive branch, or at the very least, a single finger to grasp onto. It was just enough to get the stay team’s side a leg-up in this round.
The day that she heard the song for the first time, it moved her. Her heart became weightless as if her torso filled with helium, causing her organs to float around carelessly. Her smile was so bright, it was as if she took in the light around her until she, herself, glowed. The fight was over for that night. The usual cage match may as well have been rigged toward the stay side.
For the first time in his songs, she heard genuine passion in his voice. She could tell that the lyrics were written from a place of feelings so undeniably strong, that he must still be head-over-heels for her. Why had he never just spoken these sorts of words to her? She thought that maybe their recent rough patch had sparked a new flame in his desire to really make this work this time.
On this night, she listened to the song on repeat on the drive home from work. As she walked in and placed her work bag on the shoe bench, she noticed his phone buzzing on his desk in the other room. When she stepped into the kitchen to look for him, she heard the rumblings of the water pipes and realized he was upstairs showering. His phone buzzed a few more times, but she ignored it. Humming the melody to his song, she set her dirty lunch dishes in the sink before being interrupted by the buzzing once more.
She walked over to the—now motionless and daringly quiet—phone. She glared at it as if challenging it to a staring contest. It buzzed again. Did that mean she won?
This time, as the edges of the phone lit up, a banner with a name on it slid across the top of the screen. She recognized the name, though she didn’t understand why that name was on her boyfriend’s phone.
She picked it up and swiped to the messages page. After seconds of frantic scrolling, she found the newest cage-match weapon for the leave team, except, this time, the weapon was nuclear.
It was a text from her boyfriend to another girl that read, “Listen to my newest song. I wrote it for you.”
In the text was a link to the song in question. It was the song that she had been singing along to for days. It was the song that played as the credits rolled for every cage match since she and the song had been introduced. It was the song that he said he had written for her.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new winner for the night.
It would be two years before she finally got to hear a song actually written for her by this man—a break-up song, if one can believe it. By this time, the network had canceled the cage-matches, and a new scheduled programming was set to play at that time slot. This time, the screen in her mind was riddled with questions like; what would she make for dinner the next night? Or, what time would she and her new boyfriend would meet with friends the following weekend?
What she didn’t know was that the show hadn’t disappeared from the TV station entirely—she just no longer picked up the right channel. Every now and then, when the antenna hit just right, she would get a glimpse of the fight songs and rope-jumping scenes. Only, these weren’t reruns; These were new characters, new reasons to stay, and brand-new reasons to leave.
Here it goes again.
