Muscle Memory

I creep upstairs at the Chelsea Piers Field House to watch the gymnastics team practice through the viewing window. I consider pretending I’m someone’s big sister, if anyone asks questions. Or maybe the truth will be enough—that I only want to see the gym. That I wanted to sign up for the adult open gym classes, but I don’t have a spare $380 dollars per month, and I have this rib condition, and sometimes I feel like my body doesn’t belong to me anymore.

You miss it, don’t you? an old coach asked me a few years ago. It stays in your blood. It never leaves. Addicts—that’s us. We could start a support group, share old pictures, recommend chiropractors and new hobbies. But she is the wife of a former Olympian, and the two of them coach together.

You cheated, I thought. You haven’t walked away from anything.

The doctor gave me a name for the pain that sent me to the emergency room last spring. It sounded like the name of a dinosaur. How long should I expect this to last, I asked.

I’d give it another three days. Her smile was sympathetic. Four months later, the dinosaur’s made himself comfortable. You silly thing, he chuckles. I’m not going anywhere.

A decade ago, I was in the gym forty hours per week during summer, twenty-four hours per week during the school year. It was an hour and fifteen minute commute between my house and the gym. Most of my meals were in the car. I got home most nights after 10:00 p.m.

Too many hours on the bars would rip off the weak pieces. Skin would dangle like a rubber flap on my palm. A dead, chalky nuisance. The first time it happened, my coach cut the flap off with nail scissors, placed it in my hand, and closed warm fingers over it.

Congratulations, he smiled. Be proud of this.

What do I have to show for it? Medals have been hanging on a coat hanger in my closet for ten years. A handful of trophies somewhere that it would take me too long to find. There used to be videos, but Hurricane Katrina took those. I still have a couple dozen photos that look like someone else. An aptitude for yoga and gymnastics trivia. Shoulders wider than the rest of me. Hands that will never be smooth.

We were a group of laughing thirteen-year-olds, measuring body fat and pretending to be disappointed when we just missed the single digits. To us, bodies weren’t about self-consciousness or lack of it. Weight only mattered in the way it provided or withheld power. Our bodies were half-art and half-machine, designed to do impossible things.

Now, my body does silly and fallible things I can’t make sense of. After all these years together, we find ourselves incompatible. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m fifteen pounds lighter without muscle, but less compressed. There’s a hole in my knee cartilage from a bad beam dismount, a permanently arched spine and turned-out feet, back pain.

My mother hurts from the beginnings of arthritis. We talk on the phone and share our symptoms like middle-aged women bonding over menopause.

Our bodies were half-art and half-machine, designed to do impossible things.

A recurring pain stems from my left shoulder blade, travels up my neck, and makes my arm feel numb. The doctor says she doesn’t think it’s a pinched nerve, but she offers no better guess. Another doctor feels the tension in my shoulders. You will scare people with these knots, he says.

There was a time when I thought I’d go to college on a gymnastics scholarship. Instead, I was a spectator at every home competition at my college. Half of the audience consisted of parents, friends, and boyfriends. Half were little girls from nearby gyms. Then there was me. Sometimes, I’d coerce a friend to go with me. I’d whisper a commentary for him under my breath.

I could do that, I’d tell him. I used to do that.

The dinosaur pain is the inflammation of cartilage between the ribs. There’s no specific known cause, no test to diagnose it, and no cure. It’s not dangerous, the doctor says, it’s just chronic pain. It travels around the ribs. It goes away on its own when it decides to. It comes back for visits.

I find an aerial yoga class in Greenwich Village and imagine myself flying around on silks and finally being able to stretch my spine. It will do more harm than good, the physical therapist says. The dinosaur roars, You silly thing. I try jogging instead. The doctor finds two stress fractures in my leg and says no high-impact exercise ever again. I don’t recognize the future version of me he describes. To remain myself, I must prove him wrong.

I never said the words I quit. But I cried in the car that day, a dozen years ago, when I told my mom that I didn’t want to go. I knew I was never going back. I didn’t say the words for months and I avoided the subject when people asked. I didn’t know how to articulate that I still loved gymnastics but needed a new dream to pursue. I didn’t know how to walk away from who I was.

Alone in my living room now, I walk in circles on my hands to make sure I still can. My muscles haven’t forgotten how.

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