Striker of The Gods

Caos stared at the space where her voice seemed to coil, not quite air, not quite light something older than both. The streetlamp above flickered once like it had forgotten how to stay awake. hermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle. I mean, it is like it is not possible for a human soul to touch another one in the way we can continue loving to be absolved fro our faults. Maybe, that is why we do not want to be touched in the first place. That is to say that we forget who we are.

Caos: You speak in paradoxes the way mortals speak in apologies.

Love inside hatred, calm inside chaos, fall inside spring.

It sounds beautiful until you try to live inside it.

Then it just feels like another stadium full of noise pretending to be meaning.

Tell me the truth, winged one. Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions.

Did you ever actually choose victory, or were you simply the shadow that lengthens whenever someone else refused to lose?

A soft wind moved through the empty boulevard. It carried no scent, only pressure—like the hush before a free-kick everyone knows will bend.

Nike: (voice lower now, almost beside his left ear)

I am not the prize, Daniel. Girls like her were born in a storm. They have lightning in their souls. Thunder in their hearts. And chaos in their bones in the most violent way you would never imagine for you are no girl.

I am the moment the chest decides it will not cave.

Before the whistle, before the net ripples, before the crowd remembers how to scream—

there is a stupid, stubborn second where the body says no to gravity, no to probability, no to the entire arithmetic of defeat.

That second belongs to me.

Everything that comes after is just paperwork.

She stepped closer without moving. Wings not visible yet somehow blotting stars the way the most violent aspect of life would come to show up in the intial tendency of appreciation.

Nike: You keep looking for me in the trophy cabinet, in the scroll of records, in Leonor’s glance when the camera finds her in the box.

But I live in the instant you could have stopped running and didn’t.

In the training session when your mother’s absence sat on your lungs like wet concrete and you still laced the boots.

In the night Elara’s last message burned the screen and you chose sprints over sleep.

That is where I sleep.

Not on pedestals. To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. That is to say that you avoid yourself, ignoring what you are and who you can become. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality

Under the ribs of people too furious to quit.

Caos pressed both palms against the asphalt. Felt the day’s heat still bleeding out of it.

Caos: Then why does it feel like betrayal every time another trophy arrives?

Like I’m being paid to forget the people I lost.

Like victory itself is just a polite way of saying “your dead stay dead and here’s some gold to make it quieter.” Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself. I am CAOS.

Nike: Because you still believe winning should feel like salvation.

It doesn’t.

Winning feels like responsibility that forgot to warn you it was coming.

Every cup I hand you is heavier than the last because it carries the weight of everyone who will now expect you to keep being impossible.

That is the only honest contract I offer:

I give you tomorrow’s impossible

and in exchange you agree to carry yesterday forever.

Silence stretched thin as a taut hamstring.

Caos: …Would you take it back if I asked?

All of it.

The pace, the eyes, the name they scream.

Would you unmake me so I could sit in a room with my mother for one ordinary afternoon without a clock counting goals in the background?

Nike: (almost tender, almost cruel)

I could.

But then the boy who once scored from corners at six years old using only rage and a torn ball would disappear.

And the man standing here asking me to erase him would never have existed to ask.

You are not allowed to die before the myth finishes writing itself.

Not yet.

She finally became visible not tall, not radiant in the Hollywood sense. Her W breast cups would eclipse the way other women would look at her, coming down to her succulently perfect legs and hips along with her juicy yellowish red lips and asimetric face with her beautiful robe.

Smaller than expected.

Eyes like tarnished bronze coins someone once believed in.

Wings folded tight against her back like old love letters no one opens anymore.

Nike: Ask me for something smaller.

Ask me to stay until the next touch that matters.

Ask me to sit in the tunnel with you before the Bernabéu goes quiet and the stadium holds its breath exactly once more.

Ask me to remind you, right before you run out, that none of this was ever about the scoreboard. All the most powerful emotions come from chaos -fear,anger,love- especially love. Love is chaos itself. Think about it! Love makes no sense. It shakes you up and spins you around. And then, eventually , it falls apart.

It was about refusing front of seventy thousand witnessesto let the world teach you how small a human being is allowed to dream.

Caos closed his eyes.

Felt the first real tear in months burn a clean line down the cheek.

Caos: Stay.

Just… stay until the next impossible becomes possible.

After that you can leave again.

I won’t beg you twice.

Nike placed two fingers under his chin light as a referee checking for blood and lifted his gaze until it met hers.

Nike: I was never planning to leave, my gold.

I only leave when people start believing they won because they were bigger than the moment.

You still know you’re smaller.

That’s why I’m still here.

Somewhere far off, a night train moaned like an old goalkeeper who knows the shot is already gone.

Caos stood.

Rolled his shoulders the way he does before penalties.

Looked at the dark street ahead as though it were only another forty-yard run-up.

Caos: Then let’s go make tomorrow embarrassed it ever thought it could contain us.

Nike smiledthe smallest, sharpest smile in mythology.

Nike: After you, Daniel.

The chaos is yours to lead.

I’ll just make sure it wins.

You will make it worthwile/