- Event: Refueled LXXXI
2012
Lorelai Wright remembered the day her life changed forever quite vividly. To say she was a precocious child would be an understatement as would be describing her as inquisitive. When she was four years old, she’d asked her mother if she was a happy baby. She remembered her mother looking at her for a long time before telling Lorelai she was the easiest baby in the history of babies. Lorelai was certain this was an embellishment, but she accepted it because she was four years old and that’s what four years old do. Ask questions, forget why they asked the question, care less about the answer, and move on with their day.
That was three years earlier. This was now.
She woke up as she did every single morning, in her bed, with her footie pajamas on, and feeling like she’d won the lottery in life. As she opened her eyes, she saw her toys, neatly stacked against the far wall, and proceeded to walk over there and grab a few toys that she wanted to play with. Her long brown hair was a bit shaggy, from a night of sleep, and her hazel eyes were calming. There were no worries in her mind, especially during Thanksgiving Break when she had no school to worry about.
As she played with her toys, she found herself feeling a tad bit anxious. Lorelai was what could be described as a carefree child. There were very few things in the world that she laid upon her shoulders and carried around with her. Same as the age of four, when she had a problem or something that persisted in her mind, she simply tackled it and moved forward, not giving it much of a second thought. If someone had hit her at school, she confronted the problem head-on. She wasn’t one to let things linger.
Playing with her toys, her mind went off to another world and began to create a vivid pseudo-reality that she and the toys she was playing with were part of. Think of how you would play on the playground and all of a sudden there was a damsel in distress and you were a knight, determined to save the damsel in distress. This was largely the same and while the gnawing feeling retreated into her stomach, she proceeded to play and act out her fantasies, though not as a damsel in distress or even a knight, but as someone fixing other people’s problems. It’s what she did, even at such a young age.
An hour went by before Lorelai noticed the silence that permeated the house. Her stomach rumbled a bit and she decided now would be the time to go see what was for breakfast and check in on her mom and dad. She knew they had plans to go see her grandmother later on that day and spend the night, so she was a bit confused as to why that process hadn’t begun yet. She put her toys away, stood up and smoothed out her pink pajamas, and proceeded to open the door to her bedroom.
As she stepped out of the room, she noticed there were no sounds of televisions or smells of bacon that wafted through the air. Instead, the silence continued and seemed to radiate like a beacon of despair. She looked around cautiously, wondering where her parents were as she made her way into the living room, but there was no one there. As she walked towards the kitchen, she saw some mail on the dining room table, but nothing else. Lorelai looked at the counter and normally the pot of coffee that would be on at this hour of the morning hadn’t been touched since the day before.
Lorelai looked around and though she didn’t know what was wrong, she knew something was wrong, and proceeded up the stairs towards her parents’ bedroom. The carpet felt cold under her toes and with each step, the gnawing feeling that she’d experienced an hour earlier returned and it felt much worse this time. She felt her stomach turning over several times as she climbed the stairs before she made her way down the long hallway that led to her parent’s bedroom door.
As she came closer to the door, she heard something behind the door. At first, Lorelai thought it was a television on, but instead, after a moment to decipher the sound, she realized it was crying. More specifically, it was her mother crying. Lorelai gingerly turned the doorknob to her parents’ door, surprised to find it unlocked, and opened the door to find her mother in bed, curled up with a mound of tissues lying beside her. It was clear her mother didn’t hear Lorelai as she opened the door, her eyes puffy from the incessant crying and her mind clearly somewhere else.
Lorelai walked around to the side of the bed and saw her mother lying there, looking shattered and broken in the form of a human. Lorelai climbed up the side of the bed and wrapped her arms around her mother.
“Mama, what’s wrong?” she inquired and Samantha’s eyes opened with surprise as she laid eyes upon her daughter.
“Hi, baby,” she weakly responded, opening her arms and pulling her daughter into her.
“Why are you crying, mama?” Lorelai inquired again, but the sheer question caused Samantha to start crying even harder. Lorelai wanted her mother to stop crying, to help ease the awful feeling in her belly, but she knew she needed to be strong for her mother right now as she hugged her mother tightly and let her mother’s tears stain the front of her top.
After a few moments had passed, and her mother seemed to be calming down, she looked at her again and kissed her on the forehead.
“Mama, where’s Daddy?” she asked, realizing her father wasn’t around though he normally was. Lorelai loved her daddy but was always uncertain of the mood he was in as he seemingly went from happy to angry without warning.
A moment passed between them before Samantha responded to her daughter.
“Your father,” she began. Then Samantha sat up and began to explain where her father was as Lorelai tried to process the fact that her father had walked out on them, without even saying goodbye to her, and that their world had been ripped apart.
Lorelai sat there, finally understanding the feeling in her gut as she knew this was one of those days she would never forget, no matter how much she grew up.
2018
Lorelai Wright had a peculiar ability to recall memories with little-to-no effort. She remembered vividly being on the playground, at the age of ten, when Jackson Brown came up to her and had a nervous look on her face. She liked Jackson, had spent time with him at school, on the phone, and at the mall, and liked his low-key confidence and ability to calm her nerves during some difficult days. Jackson, with his short brown hair, walked up to her and told her that he liked her. A lot. It warmed Lorelei’s heart to hear him say it because she’d thought it quite a bit. What really surprised Lorelai was that she took a step forward and kissed Jackson on the lips. It wasn’t something Lorelai had intended to do, it just happened. She still remembered the way his lips felt against hers; soft and warm. Lorelai wanted to do it again, but then a teacher caught them and yelled at them. Jackson Brown didn’t want to be her friend anymore after that.
At the age of eleven, as she began middle school, she ran into a vicious group of girls that assumed simply because their parents had money that meant they had money and ran the school. These girls aggravated Lorelai to no end and she found herself visibly irritated when she had to interact with them, whether because they were crowding the lunch line or because she had to work on a science project with one of the members of their pseudo-gang. That one member’s name was Allison Tivoli.
Allison Tivoli was one of those girls who felt they had to stuff their bra with tissue papers, play mind games with boys, and steal money out of her mother’s purse. During one science class, she had been paired with Lorelai, and they worked on a small science project that Lorelai primarily did the work on. After class, Allison met up with her friends, and once Allison told them about her partner, they immediately began to gossip about Lorelei’s mother. Lorelai overheard them calling her mother a ‘slut who was addicted to pain pills and had wanted an abortion with Lorelai but couldn’t pay for it. The words, as they hit Lorelei’s ears, sent her into a rage as she proceeded to tackle the girl to the ground and slam her elbow across her face multiple times before teachers managed to pull Lorelai off of Allison. She still felt the blood smeared across her forearm that ricocheted on her from Allison’s now broken nose.
Then, there was the time at the age of twelve, when she was walking back from the bathroom back to her world history class that a boy was in the hallway and proceeded to pull down his pants and show off his minuscule dick. Lorelai still had a chuckle at that when she thought about it.
Lorelai remembered vividly the day her life changed for a second time. Thirteen years old, excelling in school, and eager to find a project of hers that she’d done a couple of years before to help her with a new project she was working on for school. The years since her father walked out on her had been a unique journey. Even with her father out of the picture, her mother and her could still stay in the same house, live the same lifestyle, and not have a single worry in the world. The only thing that was a constant struggle was the moods she found her mother in every so often, curled up in the fetal position, and sobbing her nights away. While Lorelai had managed to adjust to life without her father, she couldn’t say the same about her mother.
As Lorelai looked through the various totes in the dimly lit garage, she came across an envelope and as she pulled the envelope out of the box, she realized that it was her birth certificate. She unfolded it and began to review, never having seen it before. As she finished looking it over, scrutinizing the details, she folded it back up and placed it in the envelope before she placed the certificate into her back pocket. A few more moments passed as she continued to look for her project but ultimately came up empty.
In truth, her mind was wandering elsewhere, and as she walked back into the house and up the stairs to the living room and kitchen area that was filled with holiday decorations, Lorelai saw her mother in the kitchen, working on dinner. Lorelai saw how good of a mood her mother was in and decided not to ask her mother the question that was weighing in the back of her mind.
That would be saved for a few days later when Lorelai could no longer hold back the question as it festered in her mind. Her mother had finished taking a shower and was sitting on the bed, seemingly in an average state, when Lorelai walked in and decided to ask her mother the very question that was eating away at her.
“Who is David Noble and why is he listed as my father on my birth certificate?”
2021
Lorelai watched as her mother died before her very eyes. A year earlier, Samantha had been diagnosed with breast cancer and an aggressive form of cancer at that. Lorelai fought with her mother constantly over the year because her mother wanted Lorelai to focus more on school while Lorelai would rather focus her attention and time on her mother, who she loved more than anything in this world. Lorelai was the practical one, honestly, the smart one as well. Samantha was optimistic in her final year, thinking she would overcome this and fight through it.
It is for this reason that Lorelai was never told all of the details between David Noble being listed as the father on the birth certificate and what happened all of those years ago now. Samantha knew she needed to tell her daughter the story, but couldn’t bring herself to do so in her weakened state. She simply stuck to the story she had told Lorelai on that day three years ago, that David was a relationship she had while dating her father and that had resulted in the birth of Lorelai. It wasn’t a complete lie, Samantha told herself. It was entirely true, just hiding the truth of the DNA that helped create Lorelai. At least, the DNA that she believed was bonded with her’s to create this enigmatic daughter. She never understood how Lorelai was the way that she was and when she flirted with the idea of why Lorelai was the way that she was, she quickly pushed it out of her mind.
It couldn’t be she would tell herself.
Still, she never imagined as her final days ticked away what would happen after her death. Samantha was certain her mother would take custody of her daughter and raise her until she turned eighteen.
Except Samantha’s mother died in a car accident on the way to the hospital to say her final goodbye’s to her daughter. Samantha never found this out before she took her last breathe. She didn’t have to watch as Lorelai shed tears out for not only the loss of her mother but also her grandmother.
Child Protective Services had to break the news to her and consoled her to the best of their ability. The caseworker assigned reviewed all of the information made available to her and found that the father on her birth certificate was still alive and made the arrangements.
This is how Lorelai found herself in the SSE Hydro arena in Glasgow without much warning. She was in a room, grieving, and then being told she would go and live with her father. A father she’d never met before. A father she knew nothing about. The David Noble that she’d created in her mind as someone she would never meet was now feet away from her and she couldn’t wrap her mind around who this person was, what he could offer her, and how she would fit in his life.
A wrestler she thought to herself. She never imagined her father would be a wrestler. But then she remembered Allison Tivoli and wondered if that was why she snapped the way she did. Did she have an unchecked anger issue that would lead to her fighting people for the slightest slight against her? Did she come from a lineage of fighters and she was the latest one that would simply need to go down this road to unlock her potential?
Many questions, just like these, filtered through her mind on the flight to Glasgow, as she watched her father, no, David getting ready for his match while offering very few words towards her. There was a shock in his eyes, Lorelai could see it clear as day, and probably mixed in all of that was a decent dosage of regret. There was no telling because his eyes were cloudy at best and she couldn’t get a good read on him. She was pretty positive her father was an invalid until she watched him walk through the curtains and out to the ring.
When she saw him in the ring, she saw him for who he was. A fighter, a warrior, and the way David destroyed Kevin Capone showed her something that made sense inside of her as well.
There was something inside of both of them that knew how to handle business and dismiss those that were less than them. She thought about Allison Tivoli again and how quickly she dismantled Allison, much like David was doing in the ring.
For the first time in a while, Lorelai felt like she had a place to belong, even if the relationship with David would never be what she ultimately wanted it to be.
She could at least find herself.
As David walked to the backstage area and was treated to by the medical staff, he then made his way over to her and placed his hand on her shoulder.
“Hey,” he said in a soft tone. “You okay?”
She slowly nodded her head before responding. “More than I thought possible right now.”
David took a long look at her and there was something there that surprised her. Something she didn’t expect to see in his eyes.
Longing.
Lorelai could tell that there was something buried under there that she needed to get out of him and that it would be substantial work to do so, but that it could unlock many of the questions and doubts she had in her mind.
Noble then smiled at Lorelai. “Good, good. Let me go get a shower in and we can go get a bite to eat. I have no idea what there is around here—“ he began before she lifted her cell phone.
“I can find us something.”
David nodded his head before he walked off and Lorelai just watched him.
She let herself smile, feeling safe for the first time in a long time.