Warehouse

Plastic gemstones leave red lines at my wrists,

and chalk catches in my breath.

There is magic in the weightless flight of spinning across a baby blue carpet.

I miss the pride in the eyes of a woman cold as ice, when she smiled and I felt the warmth of worth dance in my chest.

I miss the winter dawn, with the comfort of hair ties at my wrists and the white-capped mountains drifting like silent shadows from the car window. Here we arrived, at the warehouse, filled with mats and barefoot little girls, eyes wide with dreams. How we loved each other. How we jumped at every chance to be cherished the most, yet consoled quiet tears of sprained ankles and bleeding palms. How we raced to the break rooms holding our schoolbooks and grips, peeled leggings from our shaking skin, ran laughing through bleachers. We owned the warehouse, we who came early and stayed late, we who sacrificed our grade school years and gave our bodies to the practice. We who felt that pain was productivity, our exhaustion earned. We who fell into deep friendships, who loved our coaches like parents, who marveled at the lines that streaked our little bellies and showed the ripping skin on our hands like trophies.

It was a feeling so alive, a life so fully lived, as black nets sent us through the air, and I remember dreaming of the taste of blood and metal held between my teeth, a wooden box at my feet, a sea of hands like drumming applause. This is where it begins, they said.