Reflection
(On the television screen, no one knows who you are when the camera zooms away from the center; from your face, your body, your prized legs, and wide over the pitch of players—instead.)
You become smaller, more stick-like, almost completely nonexistent to the audience until the ball comes careening your way, and you plod through grass and body to run like a puppet with its strings suddenly yanked high and low. Your name changes. You are no longer _ _, but 'Number Ten', midfielder, and that Spaniard with the black hair and nice, winsome smile. You become 'just another out of the many Eleven', an insignificant speck running across the field with the same color jersey as your teammates'.
Your image grows blurry in their memories. Your face is never shown before their eyes. And those pictures that fly through the crowd's minds are just mere glimpses of the actual person you are deep inside – the commentators say those familiar names: your teammates, yours; and then the ball passes through your negligent legs and ends up on the opposing team's control – the commentators forget all about you: they focus on some other guy named Mario Balotelli, whom you've never met before in your life.
{Why should I care?} You think. {Who the fuck is he?}
The world soon echoes your thoughts, a mere week after the final match in Kiev. Every mistake made on either side is soon forgiven and forgotten. The colossal victory on your side is eventually shrugged off. They learn to move on. Although beautiful in all its dashing glory and illuminated brilliance, the magic lasts but a tantalizingly short, cruel moment – the insurmountable feeling of triumph and adrenaline and the beautiful sheen of metal reflecting off the trophy lifted high above Iker Casillas's head.
(You remember grinning like crazy, maybe a bit too widely, sitting next to your best friend in the middle of the pitch, posing for one of the many 'Front Headlines' pictures. He has his arm around you, and the presence of his body pressed tight against yours is a sensation that's both safe and oppressive at the same time. You remember your eyes roaming, of its own accord, around that vast, vast stadium, at the strangers staring back at you, screaming, shouting, waving flags the color of slaughtered meat and decaying sunflowers, and you wonder – for the briefest of seconds – why you suddenly feel so alone, so isolated, so goddamn lonely, surrounded by all your friends and teammates, and the thousands upon thousands of people focused solely on you and no one else.)
Later, when you're on the plane back home, griping as your teammates' loud singing brutally incapacitates your ability to fall asleep, you wonder back to that moment again.
For a second, it flickers vivid with emotion, color, and sense. You can hear the wild cadence of the crowd, cheering, buzzing, loudly in your ears; feel the roar of bodies piling on top of yours in a frenzied, pre-mature celebratory execution; see the endless constellation of crimson and gold stretching as wide as the Mediterranean Sea through a film of sweat and joyful tears.
But the image has a lifespan of a second before it shifts slightly from the center, away from your grasp and towards some blank, unknown corridor; and blurs out into an empty, dark grey. It almost feels as though another person – that faceless, nameless stranger on the television screen – took your place onstage two days ago; accepting the medal, hugging your friends and family, kissing the trophy—all in your place.
You find your gaze traveling to the window and into it, at the reflection staring back calmly. It doesn't look familiar. Beside you, _ _ is laughing as he watches the recorded replay of the final yet again; a slight flicker of annoyance fills your chest at his carefree, idiotic barks; you glance at him and his bright, grinning face, then down at the iPad in his hand with contempt. The pitch is much smaller on the screen than you remembered it to be. Although the picture quality is one-hundred-percent, devastatingly-perfect, and crystal-fucking-clear, a chill runs down your spine at the lack of personal quality you find in each red-and-yellow speck running across the reflection.
"Who's that?" you're asking before you can stop yourself.
_ _ laughs, rolling his eyes, and elbows you roughly, teasingly. "That's me, silly!" he says without missing a beat, "Can't you tell? Who else has that much swag on the pitch, eh?"
But you don't return his quip; your eyes scrunch in solemn concentration to make out the tall figure racing towards the goal on the other end of the pitch; he seems foreign, his name eludes you completely. All you're able to discern is a large, glaring number three on his back.
"Number Three," you murmur quietly. Test it out on your tongue. It feels odd there, but for some reason, you can't think of anything else to call this person.
"What was that?" your best friend, Number Three, says distractedly, eyes moving back to the final match in his hands—a mere reflection of the actual, living, breathing counterpart that took place two days ago.
"Nothing," you force a chuckle out. "I just don't think I see any of that so-called 'swag' you've got there."
(And deep down inside, you actually mean it.)
~.
Author's Note:
Just in case I wasn't clear enough in my hints, Cesc Fabregas is 'You' in the snippet ('Number Ten'), and his best friend is – of course – Gerard Piqué ('Number Three'). The final mentioned above in Kiev is the Euro 2012 final, Spain v. Italy (July 1st, 2012), in which Spain was the victor. Iker Casillas is their captain; therefore he got to lift up the trophy. Besides that, everything else in this snippet is NOT true whatsoever; anything I've said about these football players is my own fictional thoughts.
This was my first time ever writing in 2nd POV. I'm relatively proud and satisfied with it, even though it doesn't feel wholly 'complete.' I basically winged this as an experiment and wrote in a very strange, messed-up format. I kind of like it, since it's all very haphazard, as it should be. [7/30/12]