Freedom of the Wild

Chapter 4 • Wicked tales

KABOOM!
I wake from the horrendous nightmare. Beads of sweat roll down my just-seen-a-ghost face, as I recall the cursed dream which woke me up.

I got out of bed and did my daily routines. I had tuition at noon and I didn't want to attend it. I've not played computer games for a long time and these few weeks I'd been considering if I should start playing League of Legends again.

The problem is, nowadays computer games bore me. As time passes, things change. The classic aspects of popular games get removed, or reworked and the latest updates are totally game-changing. Literally. Pun-included. What I mean is that when these games first started, their animations and graphics had the "ancient" look and there weren't any of edits they do to the game in the current trend. I miss the past, how things were in games I played when I was growing up. People think that adding better features and trashing the old ones would not only improve the game, but also because gamers would continue playing it for a long time. They're all wrong. History is essential too. How the game first began as, is how the game should continue with minimal tweaks to fix bugs and glitches. Adding too many things would only make it complicated to play.

Talking about the past, my head started to fill up with memories. I used to be in the competitive badminton team for one and a half years when I first enrolled into Secondary school. During the first year, the coach of the badminton team was a short-tempered, vain son-of-a-bitch. I still remember how he would force us to do overwhelming physical training like "Rabbit Hops" and "Suicide Run" when we made slight mistakes, apart from the basic ones consisting of push-ups, sit-ups, knee-to-chest jumps and "burpees". Even when we were all burned out and too weak to carry on, he would think that we were bringing up excuses out of laziness and holler at us not to stop. The whole team disliked him. Once, he was so agitated by my senior's poor performance that he threw and broke his costly racquet in disgust. The following day, he came with a brand new one. Apart from being a coach, he also acted in MediaCorp television which explains his wealthiness.

After that year of suffering, I managed to maintain in the team and we found a new coach, as the last one left to start his own food business. Good riddance. The new coach was bubbly and had a great personality and attitude towards us. But my new teammates, the juniors who just joined, did not. Some of them I was fond of, my favourite juniors. The rest? They were arrogant, little pricks. Worse, they did execute what the coach told them to do and instead slack and deceive him. When I couldn't bear with the team anymore, I made the choice to quit and enter Table Tennis as my co-curricular activity. Not only was it my favoured hobby, I had a huge addiction to playing table tennis - it entertained me. I could just go on playing for hours until I lost track of time. I do this almost every week.

Whenever I went to the school hall and saw the badminton team training, I would miss the old times and get jealous of my juniors who were much, much more skilled than me. Sigh, it just hurts. I can't switch back and even if I could, I wouldn't, because I heard that there was a new coach again and that she was a lousy bitch.

"We got that super love..." As I recalled the past, I used Spotify to play some music to get me into the mood. In the blink of an eye, donkey's years flew past, leaving behind traces of regret. How I wish I could relive some of those precious moments...

And then I thought of all the infatuations I had with girls since the start of Secondary school, including one I fell with a stunning impact for, for more than a year. A mass of pain and hurt.

Recently, I had my first heartbreak. It was a few months back, when I had this crush but I treated and thought of her different from the others. She was my motivation for all that I did. With her, for her, I could do anything. I really couldn't lose her, because I promised myself that I wouldn't go off finding another person to like after her. She even liked me back at some point, but we kept it from each other though it was obvious. And our friends told us. It was one calamitous day when she messaged me directly and told me to give up on her, as she still loved her ex-boyfriend and didn't want me to get hurt... I have to stop thinking back...

I cleared my thoughts. And I said to myself, you're the strongest. Don't doubt yourself as you can withstand more than anyone else. "...Nobody can drag me down"