I come from a town where the wind is the only thing that moves with any purpose. Wichita. The sky goes on forever and the buildings are low and the people are quieter than they have any right to be. The plains stretch out in every direction like a held breath, flat and gray and indifferent, and I have been standing in that indifference for twenty-six years without quite knowing what to do with it. I fight in basements and warehouses and VFW halls across Kansas and Oklahoma and Missouri. I travel by bus and I sleep on floors that are not mine and I eat at diners that close at nine and open at five and exist in the space between people who have somewhere to be and people who have nowhere to be and have decided, for the moment, that the latter description is comfortable enough. I have been fighting for as long as I can remember, though I do not remember the beginning. I know only the middle and the end, which are usually the same thing: I get hit, I hit back, somebody falls down. Sometimes I win. Sometimes I lose. The people who organize these fights give me fifty dollars when I lose and a crumpled bill that might be a hundred when I win. I keep the winning bills in a shoebox under my bed. I have enough of them to buy a bus ticket to somewhere I have never been. I have never bought one. I do not know why. Not in the philosophical sense. In the practical sense. I could sit here all day and tell you what I know and what I do not know, and the list would be short. I know how to move my feet. I know how to throw a jab. I know how to take a punch and keep coming. I know the smell of liniment and the sound of canvas when a body hits it and the feeling of sweat running down your spine like a slow river in a suit that is not yours. These are certainties. They are the only three certainties I have in my entire life. The rest of it -- my name, my age, where I sleep at night, whether I have a mother or a father or a brother or a sister or a dog or a tree or a river or anything at all that connects me to the world outside the ring -- I do not know. Or rather, I know these things exist. I know that if you asked someone else, they could tell you my name. I know that there is a shoebox under my bed filled with crumpled bills that proves, in some small and temporary way, that I exist. But I do not know who I am in the way that other people seem to know who they are. Five years ago, or maybe ten, I was sitting on the back steps of a bar in Tulsa after losing a fight that I had not really been trying to win. I was twenty-one -- I think. I was tired in a way that sleep does not fix. I was looking at the sky -- the same sky I have been looking at my whole life, flat and gray and indifferent -- and something in me simply stopped asking questions. Not gave them up. Stopped. I realized that I do not know who I am. I do not know what I want. I do not know what tomorrow will bring or whether I will have a place to sleep next week or whether I will wake up dead in a motel room and some stranger will find me. All of this is possible and none of it matters to me. Except for one thing. When I am in the ring, I know exactly what I am doing. I know how to move my feet. I know how to throw a jab. I know how to take a punch and keep coming. In the ring, I am not a person who does not know his own name. I am a boxer. There is a difference. So I keep fighting. Not because I want to win. Not because I believe in anything. Because it is the only thing in my life that I understand completely. The ring is a square. The rules are fixed. The outcome is uncertain. These are the only three certainties I have. And for a man who does not know who he is, three certainties is more than most people get in a lifetime. I have been winning more often lately. The people who watch me fight say I have changed. They say I move differently. That I do not seem to be trying. I do not disagree with them. I am not trying. Trying implies that there is something I want. I do not want anything. The man who runs the fights in Tulsa -- a heavy-set man named Earl who wears a suit that does not fit him and talks with his hands the way men talk when they are nervous but do not want you to know it -- told me last week that a promoter from Chicago has heard about me. He said Chicago is a big city. He said big cities have big fights. He said big fights have big money. I asked him what happens after the money runs out. He did not have an answer for that. He looked at me with his small, nervous eyes and his ill-fitting suit and he shrugged and said "You find more money." I nodded. I did not tell him that I had asked myself the same question -- what happens after the money runs out -- and that I had never found an answer. That night, I sat on the edge of my bed in the motel room where I had been staying for three weeks -- Room 7, the one with the leaky faucet and the television that only received one station and the bedspread that had been stained by something that was not mine -- and I opened the shoebox. Inside were forty-three crumpled bills. Some were fifty dollars. Some were a hundred. Some were folded so many times that the paper was soft as cloth. I picked them up one by one and counted them and put them back in the box and closed the lid. I picked up a hundred-dollar bill and turned it over in my hands. I looked at it for a long time. I thought about buying a bus ticket. I thought about going somewhere I had never been. I thought about Wichita and the wind and the sky and the flat gray indifference of the plains. Then I put the bill back in the box. I closed the lid. I turned off the light. I lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling and waited for sleep. === OTMES Objective Code (v2) === Work: 绝世主宰 | Variant: The Only Certain Thing TI=42.6|M1=4.5,M3=5.0,M4=7.0,M9=2.0|N1=0.20,N2=0.80|K1=0.90,K2=0.10|V=0.40,I=0.50,C=1.00,S=0.10,R=0.25|theta=270deg|Style=F|Tier=T4遗憾级 Similarity Cluster: ExistentialMinimalist Tragedy Tier: T4 遗憾级 Generated: 2026-06-08T04:51 © 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- パスポート番号[ちゅうごく] 중국 여권 번호 Номер паспорта หมายเลขหนังสือเดินทาง Passnummer رقم جواز السفر CHN Passport) The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED （BRN74685111） all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement. Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication. To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net