The Diary of Magdalena Lockheart

Entries:
#1: Never Question the Heart
#2: Always Respect the Perspective
#3: Focus Only on What Matters
#4: I Am Relentless (For Better and For Worse)
#5: Forget Everything You Thought You Knew

 

 

I started this journey, this… journal… with one question in mind.

Who am I?

It’s a tough question to answer, and I found out quite quickly that asking it meant asking a myriad of other, sometimes even tougher questions. We all know how hard honesty can be – sometimes the truth does hurt – and maybe the truth of who I am wouldn’t be something that I wanted to hear. I still had to ask… still had to dig in fervent hope that I’d find the answers that would make all the effort worth it. I believed, and still do believe, that things like identity and purpose and meaning are out there, somewhere. Maybe they’re not written in stone and perhaps not anything that anyone can tell me. Yet it’s faith in these principles that have kept me moving forward so far… and for better or for worse… it will continue to be that faith in the asking that will keep me moving on.

Like any journey, it’s all about steps… as in singular; small. Perhaps it is the artist in me that I tend to over-analyze everything. You see, I thought this was going to be a linear journey at first… I thought “the path” was straightforward and narrow. Now I see it’s not like that at all. Nothing about “the path” I’ve walking has been straightforward. One step forward is frequently accompanied by two-steps back and five more to the side. Life as I have lived it since coming back to Carnage has been more like a dance. The path to redemption… the path to figuring out not only where I belong but where I stand… has been more about making the right steps at the right time than anything else. One wrong move and I feel like I can end up worse than just going back to square one.

It’s been infinitely interesting to see just how far I’ve come without literally going anywhere. I now know exactly what lies ahead of me and it’s the same old song and same old dance that I’ve been through before. But I can’t even remotely pretend that I’m the same person with the same mindset as I re-face this challenge ahead. It’s been moments like seeing the fight in Sebastian Steel, seeing the innocence of Zaia, seeing the chaos in Richards that has made me appreciate just how different we can be while still fighting for the same thing. There was a moment at WAR that caught me completely off-guard…perhaps because I truly wasn’t expecting it…

…and unlike most of what I make available to the general public, you don’t even have to take my word for it.

It was near the end of the match with Melody. Spoiler warning, you may want to watch We Are Relentless first. Long story short, we fought hard and into the back. Not so uncommon, right? Eventually, she and I were fighting in a hallway when Melody speared me through the door of a rando office. Turns out, it was Jason Bridges office, and he was still inside. Yep, even the professional wrestling industry cannot escape the overarching concept of irony, or so it would seem. There was a moment where maybe the two most impacted people in Carnage Wrestling today by Jason Bridges were gasping, grunting, screaming, bleeding, not just on the man’s doorstep, but right at his feet.

…and then there was a moment…

…that moment that would change how I felt about Melody Lennox. Possibly forever.

I glanced down at her in a moment where she just happened to be looking up at Bridges. I don’t know the context, I didn’t see the look on her face at that angle and I doubt that she said anything to him, or he to her. But I watched as Bridges turned and walked out of the office, leaving Melody there with nothing. No help, no support… he just cast her aside as if she meant nothing to him as he left her to serve his own self-interest.

I watched Melody Lennox shatter.

Maybe to you it wasn’t as loud as the glass from the framed poster I smashed over her head, but to me it was deafening. I literally stood and watched the fight from Melody fucking Lennox leave her body as if her soul decided that it could not take anymore. No one who knows Lennox, really knows her (whether they like her or not) would ever say that the woman didn’t have ‘fight’ in every ounce of her body… didn’t have ‘fight’ written all the way down to her DNA. But I said that, that’s what I thought going into this match… and the twenty minutes leading up to this moment was Melody Lennox teaching me that I didn’t know a God-damn thing about her.

I read a few tweets and thought I could judge a book by its cover.

Melody had spent that whole time teaching me with her fists and with her feet that I knew nothing. And she warned me that I was over-reaching, that I was in a bit over my head… would I have really listened? Now the truth was staring me right in the face and in that moment I had to question not only everything I thought I knew about Melody Lennox, not only everything I thought I knew about the nature of Jason Bridges, but also everything I thought I knew about myself.

In that moment I learned that I failed to not question Melody’s heart. In that moment I learned that I failed to respect her perspective. In that moment I learned that realized that I didn’t focus on what truly matters because… in hindsight… I never knew what any of these things actually were.

I just thought that I did.

In that moment I learned more about Melody Lennox then I knew about myself. I felt her pain through empathy… but that did not stop me from finishing the match. Good guys, bad guys, the reasons that we all do the things that we do… I thought that I would be happy to not only walk out of an UltraViolent match with a bad-ass, two-time CW World Heavyweight Champion but to somehow get the W…

I even thought ‘I should be’.

But I didn’t.

I felt ugly.

 

 

Later on, I had just finished getting patched up in the med-suite after my match with Melody, and I wanted to be gone. I had a million things running through my mind and the result of the match was not one of them. (I was over it.) I honestly didn’t care about the rest of We Are Relentless, the upcoming Season of the Witch pay-per-view, the next Chaos, or the implications of being a number-one contender to anything or anyone at that particular moment. I didn’t care. I kept my headphones on blast and my eyes on the exit door. The ugliness was crawling on my skin, and nothing I could do here would cleanse it.

Luggage rolling at my side, it acted as the crutch I needed but also the one I didn’t want anyone to know about at the time. Coming out of one of these UltraViolent matches worse-off than ever before was the joke (that I’m still slowly and painfully realizing) I’m almost always the punchline of. I didn’t even bother changing out of my bloody ring gear. I just wanted to be gone. Forget sticking around to see who the champion would be when I take him/her on in October… the last thing I needed at that moment was another chance encounter with Bridges. Staying in the back glued to a monitor wasn’t glamorous to me, whatever statement about being the ‘last to leave’ can and frequently does belong to somebody else. I could have only imagined the kind of shit Bridges would inevitably throw-up in my face about how I chose to fight Lennox instead of rolling over for her – and I have quite the imagination. Anxiety ensued.

So yeah, screw this place sometimes.

I was on my way out the door but did not notice someone chasing after me. I didn’t hear her heels clacking on the floor like I picture they must’ve. I didn’t turn around to see her running towards me in another one of those ridiculous outfits that our esteemed President picked out for her. I nearly jumped out of my body the moment I felt her hand latch onto my shoulder with force. I spun with my fist cocked thinking it was someone else, assuming they had an axe to grind. She threw her arms up in defense. I sighed when I realized who it was. I yanked my headphones down, completely surprised to see her there at all.

“Cherie, what the hell?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you Mags.” She replied as we both took a moment to regain ourselves. “I heard that you were leaving out… you weren’t answering your phone and I-”

I peered over at the exit door and then back at Cherie.

“I am leaving.” I stated as matter-of-factly as I could possibly put it. “Job’s done. I’m going home.”

“Don’t you wanna see the rest of the show though? …at least who wins the UltraViolent title match?”

“Nope.”

I slid my headphones back over my ears and started to walk again. Cherie was talking, but I ignored her completely. I could see how frustrating it was for her for me to treat her like a ghost. But it was fitting. Whether she knew it at the time or not, she was a big part of the reason why I didn’t want to stay. There’s a lot of other superstars meandering around backstage trying to be the front office’s loyal terriers. But I wasn’t one of them.

I would have kept walking if Cherie didn’t pull a front office favorite maneuver and physically block my path. She stood with her arms folded across her chest. I dropped my headphones to my shoulders a second time.

“I don’t get it,” She said, the toe of her shoe tapping on the hard floor. “What’s your issue?”

I sneered.

“My issue?” I chuckled. “With you? Oh, cut the act Cherie. Don’t act like you don’t know.”

I was fully confident that she knew, but the look on her face said otherwise.

“Don’t know what? What the hell are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” I replied. “You’re the one that told me that everything with Amber would be taken care of. How did you put it? You’ll make sure she gets the ‘VIP treatment’? Well she got the VIP treatment alright.”

Cherie pulled her shoulders up and shook her head.

“You’re… upset that Amber wasn’t treated well enough?” She asked. “I don’t know how much more VIP I can make it, Mags.” She said with a bit of her own anger showing through gritted teeth.

I mumbled some pretty harsh words under my breath as I pushed past Cherie. She stomped her heel on the ground before turning to match my pace toward the exit.

“What more do you want from me?” She growled, struggling to keep up with my grueling pace. “Do you know how much those club-level tickets go for on pay-per-views? I practically gave her an entire box to herself!”

“Oh, so that’s why security wouldn’t let her through the fucking door.” I sneered. “I’m not worth having a guest apparently.”

Cherie’s eyes widened. It was almost as if her mind went blank. I was angry at her. She was angry at me too I suppose. But I guess neither one of us really knew why. Or at least we didn’t know who really was to blame.

“Wait, what?”

“I trusted you,” I snapped back. “Amber even trusted you. But I should’ve known better. Amber drove all the way down here from New York just to be turned around and sent home.”

“What do you mean ‘security wouldn’t let her in’ ?”

“I mean they told her that she was banned from the building tonight. Said it was ‘Bridges orders’. Now I understand if you people don’t want to have her around because you’re trying to get at me, but you at least could have said something before she made the effort. Of all of the dirty shit I’ve seen in my time and this has got to be a new low… and that’s saying something.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it.” She placed her arms up on her chest. “I didn’t know about it until just now, I swear. There’s no reason that security should have stopped her. None. Unless it was Bridges… maybe he said something to them right before the show… But why would he-”

“Oh yeah?” I pointed back up the hallway towards the heart of the building. “And you wouldn’t have been standing right there next to him in his little office when he said it? You’re his secretary, right?”

Cherie sighed.

“I mean, why did I even expect that you could take care of a comp ticket in the first place? What can you really do but what he tells you to?”

Cherie looked at me as if I were breaking her heart… and in hindsight maybe I was. All I could think to do in the moment was shake my head. I was disgusted… with everything… and I decided to take it out on her.

“You already dress up for him,” I sneered. “God only knows what else.”

“Shut up.”

“No, seriously, I get it now… I completely understand.” I turned my head and spat on the Capital One arena grounds. “We all just try to do what’s best for ourselves, right? Who gives a shit who else suffers in the process as long as we all get what we want?”

I reached out for the handle to the exit door but Cherie put her hand on top of mine. I turned to her and I saw the tears coming from her eyes… her quivering lips.

“I thought you knew. I thought out of anyone here you would understand. But you have no idea what I deal with.” She replied in that mix of anger and sadness and complete disgust at what I just said. “I swear to you that I will get to the bottom of this. I’m really sorry that Amber wasn’t allowed in tonight. But I can fix this. I will fix this.”

“Oh yeah?”

She nodded her head, looking as though she the dam was about to bust loose on her.

“Well don’t even bother.” I yanked the door open, despite her hand being on top of mine. “It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s all about giving Bridges what he wants… and that’s something you’ve always been really good at.”

I yanked my arm away and stormed out the door.