The Writers' Circle

Darla

	The new year really does feel like a new start. My performances on the satellite tour, though frustrating, were good enough to get me highly enough ranked to play on the main tour.  As always the season starts down in and around Australia, so it's there I take my first few tentative steps back out on the real tour. I'm playing under a pressure that is alien to me, the pressure of at least maintaining my ranking so that I can stay out on tour. The last time I was this lowly ranked I was only eighteen and had nothing on my mind but getting to the top as quickly as I could. Now before and after every match I find myself thinking about the consequence the result will have on my ranking. It's a terrible mind set to be in but one that I'm finding incredibly difficult to get out of. 
	I get through the January section of the tour with my ranking still intact, having won four matches and lost three. Never would have thought that I would look upon such a run of results as a triumph. The most infuriating thing is that the three loses came against girls younger than me, who in all honesty aren't fit to lace my tennis shoes. But right now they move better than me and hit harder than me, what's more they play with a confidence bordering on arrogance. The probably weren't even on tour the last time I was, and have no idea of the calibre of player they are beating. 
	After those three events I come home for a rest from competition for a few weeks. The hard courts down under haven't done my knee any favours. Despite ice treatment on it for an hour after every match and practice session it still aches. A couple of weeks spent at home, doing nothing of any great physical exertion other than swimming and my rehab exercises, does nothing to rid me from the ache. The next tournament I enter is the Indian Wells at the start of March, it's in Los Angeles and close enough that I can stay at home each night. Outside the four Major Championships this event is one of select bunch that is the next level down. Most regular tour events last one week, bigger ones like this last two. I'd dearly love to be play in the second week but I feared some young skinny thing would send me packing before then.
	The rest allowed me to at least take to the court in only slight pain. Still I wasn't physically capable of moving as well as I used to, nor did I trust my knee enough to move as well as should be able to. Despite the inner demons and the stuttering movement, I somehow managed to win a couple of matches. Waiting for me in the third round was Holly, the two time French Open Champion. A year older than me, but her career didn't really take off until after my injury. As if the tennis Gods had decided that someone had to fill the void left by me and they wanted it to be a Belgian. Before the match she is extremely friendly and genuinely happy to see me out on tour again. During the match she is as ruthless as I expected, I'd have been disappointed with her if she'd have been anything else. We have some great rallies that encourage me to think that I can live with her, but in all honesty I never look like winning the match. Holly dismisses me 6-4, 6-3 and as soon as she smashes the winning shot she's back to being genuinely friendly.
	So it wasn't a skinny thing, younger than me that sent me packing. It was a contemporary of mine, shoving in my face exactly how far I had fallen. For the second week of the tournament I hardly leave my house. Spend more waking hours in cyber space than in the real world. Chat rooms are full of people pretending to be better looking than they are, whereas I always find myself pretending to be someone less good looking than I actually am. The funny thing is that if I went on their saying I was Darla Van Der Wolfe, voted the best looking player on tour for the two years preceding the snap, no one would believe me. Even pictures wouldn't be evidence, anybody remotely computer savvy could easily find pictures of me on the internet and post them. The only way I could prove it would be by using my webcam, even then most people would just think I was a convincing look a like. Of course it's a mute point anyway, because the last thing I want is people knowing what I do in cyberspace. I have several different characters that I take turns playing, depending on my mood. Sometimes I even pretend to be male, slightly countering the mass of men out there pretending to be women. The more varied and bizarre the characters, the further away from real life I feel, which in turn helps to reduce the guilt. Sometimes I'm not even sure why I feel guilty, it's not like I'm doing anything illegal or hurting anyone. It's just that I know that spending hours on a computer playing out other people's fantasies is not how I should be spending my time. I should be spending my time being a great tennis player. But that's so hard when your knee won't let you practice as much as you know you need to, and you fear that no matter how much you practice you'll never be as good as you used to be. So much easier to switch on the computer and drift of into a fake world, a world without dreams must be a world without nightmares. Or maybe that world is one big nightmare I need to wake up from.