We only went to the gymnasium because we’d heard they were giving out free cookies. We signed up for beginner classes, the ones where you do backward rolls and try to climb on the beam without getting a heart attack. We wore all kinds of leotards: sparkly snakeskin aquamarine, velvet numbers that darkened whenever you brushed your hands against the fabric, tie-dye unitards evoking Care Bears that had vomited their own Milky Way. My sister and I went once a week, frolicking like kids in a playground with uneven bars and a floor that felt like a springboard. Every day we’d look at the back wall that featured an arc composed of stars: it started with red and yellow stars, later blue, purple, eventually gold. Each star symbolized a level, ranging from Beginning and Intermediate to Advanced. I went from red to gold in one day.
The only reason I was asked to be part of the national Team was because I did a back handspring in front of the coach. My stepfather had gotten a trampoline and I’d spent most days trying to arch my back until I could finally jump from my feet to my hands, coiling like a spring. I didn’t know what I was doing, only that it felt good to want to do something impossible and to realize that impossible wasn’t really a thing. Just like checkered Vans, Pacsun belts, and bedazzled phones probably weren’t a thing outside of suburban Florida. In the greater scheme of life, though, ‘impossible’ was a thing, a universal concept. Except that our minds aren’t universal — and our minds are the ones that define what’s possible and what isn’t.
My teammate’s father used to joke that watching us train was like watching the marines. Our coach scared the shit out of us, and we conditioned for one to two hours a day before training, climbing two-story ropes with our legs posed at straight 90 degree angles so we’d only rely on our upper body strength. My middle school PE teacher grew to love me because I always won the quarterly physicals that tested strength, endurance, and flexibility: I could wrap my forearms around my feet, do more than ten pull-ups, and I was relatively decent at running the half mile around the quad.
There was only one boy who always managed to beat me and my pulse would always race whenever he deigned himself to talk to me. That’s when I started to invite people to touch my stomach. I’d have them rub their fingers below my ribs, right above my belly button, caressing the contours of muscle below my skin. Everyone was amazed. Everyone except him. Those aren’t abs, he said. Those are your ribs. You’re just skinny. I told him he was wrong. I lifted up my shirt so he could see the shadows etched onto the disfigured squares marking my stomach.
Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror I thought I would have been much better looking as a boy. My flexed biceps contoured against my shoulders, my chest was flat either because I had yet to get my period or because I didn’t possess genes that would eventually amount to full breasts. My hair was always gelled back until it crispened against my scalp, painful and unyielding whenever I dared run my fingers through it. The only good thing about waddling in a pre-pubescent limbo was that I never had to worry about waxing or shaving the slivers of thigh visible around my leotard.
Every day before practice, I’d conjure up a sickness or will myself to get a headache. The one day my mom didn’t let me stay home with a self-imposed stomach ache, I ended up winning a leotard because I managed to swing up into a handstand on the parallel bars. But then I was back to waiting in line for my turn at the vault or trying out a glide kip mount on the bars. The twins in level five would share an inside joke, whispering to each other with their translucent, freckled skin and tooth-pick thighs. Serena, probably the most flexible of us all, would discuss an upcoming birthday party with Bianca, whose tan skin and brown eyes I’d always found the kindest of them all. Maya would quip a snarky yet witty comment, casually placing her weight on one leg as the others laughed. I’d usually sing to myself, pausing every once in a while to ask my teammates a question here and there.
I’d later equate gymnastics with the faint anxiety that would one day upend me in dinner parties. The desire to make conversation even though it wasn’t offered. The political correctness of laughing even though everything said scores severely low on your scale of competent humor. A sensitivity to others’ perceptions of your social sobriety and the belief that they can sense your discomfort and unsexy solitude akin to that of sitting alone in a cafeteria. The necessity to do something with your hands, look down at your phone or at the menu, sip from a coffee cup or a wine glass to give the illusion that in the midst of your silence, you possess an inkling of purpose.
I was a brick, stiff and unbending, training myself slowly to widen my legs past the screams of my ligaments. Our coach would berate us whenever we stretched. Square your hips, she’d say. You’re not cheerleaders. Some people are born flexible, placidly sitting on their cervix as their legs splay in opposite directions. I had to work for it. And even then, the results were seventy degrees from the desired amplitude. Serena’s back was so flexible that whenever we sat on the floor she’d arc her back until her toes swept above her head and grazed her lower lip. I dreamed about what my split jumps would look like if my limbs were more malleable, how my back walk-over would feel if my legs weren’t tethered to one another.
We’d point our toes, tighten our tushies, dismount into clean landings more often than not. Our couch would ask me what my summer plans were and sigh whenever I told her I was visiting my family in South America. Those were three months I could be spending in summer camp, training four hours a day and learning the stunts necessary to pass to the next level. I would complain to my mom because our summer vacations were the reason I’d barely make it to the next level the upcoming year. In the battle between going to practice every day and going practice every day while still repeating the same level, there was a distinctively lesser evil.
Despite training me to develop burgeoning muscles and bottomless strength, gymnastics was a constant reminder of how powerless I really was. It consisted of five days a week, three hours each day, Saturday mornings and Summer months that were not mine to begin with. It was all-consuming, an inescapable reality that became a part of my every day, like church on Sundays or our yearly trip to visit my stepfather’s family in Texas. Gymnastics was the dinner party with the relatives I couldn’t stand, the wait at the bank teller I would have rather avoided, the various instances in life where I would have much rather preferred to stay home. When you’re a kid, you can’t leave when you grow bored, you can’t hail a taxi simply because you don’t want to spend the next hour helping your mother choose tea tree oil or the perfect ceramic dishware. You’re forced to stay because unlike certain mammals that forage and hunt a few weeks after they’re born, human children are incredibly helpless.
My mother didn’t let me quit. Gymnastics was akin to guided tours, all-inclusive vacations, any type of field trip and outing that I would evade later on in life. Anything that has been severely planned to the point of designating food choices, allocations, pit stops, bathroom breaks, or dictating the window of time I can or cannot dedicate to any one thing, stripping me of sovereignty, regressing to a childhood impotence where I’m bereft of decision-making. A sweeping, suffocating ineptitude.
There was always a heaviness in my chest: metal clinking like Christmas, jostling like horse-drawn carriages and weighing me down like wine on an empty stomach. I’d grow to expect it, the Pavlonian response that associated breakfast with mornings, Sundays with church, summers with South America. I stood on the highest podium, my hair gelled to my skull and my legs dried with chalk. I raised both hands straight above my head, arching my arms behind me. I imagined a string tying my shoulder blades together, rubbing bone against bone. I smiled a beaming, toothy smile that stretched like the medals hanging around my neck, bathing in the inevitable correlation, cause-and-effect, or tropism that was performance and applause.
Isabella Garces is a Colombian writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She produces content for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and her writing can be found in Esquire, Popshot Magazine, and la piccioletta barca, among others.