All About Cherry

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

     A t l a s  C h e r r y  felt like he deserved some time off. It was exactly why he decided to quite literally ignore everybody's existence even more than usual for a week and a half and in hindsight, it wasn't all that different from his normal lifestyle. He'd skipped out on a weekend of beatings at the Dead End, deciding that the bonus from last time was more than enough to miss a weekend, the first weekend off since he had started.

     It felt rather offputting at first, Atlas was almost itching to go back, because over the years fighting had become an integral ritual every week. Regardless, he fought his urges and decided to relax a little.

      But in reality, that week and a half of torturous leisure was nothing but Atlas stalling. He had had his midterms during the week, somehow managing to focus his wild and compulsive mind on his studies for a moment. 

      The only comforting part of his time off was that he passed his midterms with flying colors and only had to look forward to defending his degree at the end of the year. Which was an entirely different deal he did not want to focus on at that point in time. It wasn't the first time and it surely wouldn't be the last that Atlas was expressing concerns about his studies, what would he really do? What was his course of action? Those fairy tales in his head weren't, if he thought he would just be able to turn his life around for the better, to snap out of this torturous and monotonous routine, he was more than wrong. If anything he speculated that nothing would change.

     He'd fight at the club, the pay was just too good and the effort required was marginal compared to a regular job. Eventually, he'd get bored of being alone, start sleeping with a bunch of other people seeking for comfort, until he eventually crumbled under the weight of his soul-crushing baggage and accepted a blood match. 

     It didn't matter what way Atlas tried to shape up his future in his head, it never ended with a happy ending. Perhaps it was just him being pessimistic, which, to be fair, he was sort of known for, but above all of that, he was simply being realistic. He was a twenty-three-year-old with no aspirations in life, no game plan like on the ring, no reason to truly keep going but also no reason to change.

     He had told himself that his reason for perseverance was to be better than his mother, to show that he had some worth to him, that he wasn't as pathetic as she had been. But Atlas had done that a long time ago, he was attending an Ivy League school for god's sake.

     Truthfully, he feared the future, would his misery eventually transpire into something as uncontrollable and destructive as his mother's addiction? Would he truly go full circle and realize that he was not any better than her after all? 

     For all Atlas knew, ignorance was bliss. And with that conclusion, he decided to end that train of thought and leave it for a sunnier day, before he once again turned to alcohol to drown the nagging voice in his head out. 

     He sighed, sitting on the floor of his apartment, dark as ever, a couple of days worth of scruff on his face being overly annoying and itchy, still, he kept it because he was lazy. Atlas' physical appearance resembled what he felt on the inside, and man, this was the worst he'd felt about himself in a very long time. He turned his head to face the mirror, his back supported by his squeaky bed frame.

     His wounds had almost fully healed, a little scar had formed on his cheek, relentlessly holding on and refusing to leave. Just another one in the collection. Atlas' grey eyes held no emotion in the mirror, shrouded and dark. When did he become this way? Why couldn't he just be normal, despite all of the shit he'd been through? Other people could do it, so why was Atlas special enough to be burdened with more baggage than he could ever carry?