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But I can’t. I have to move forward.
That thought spurs me to take the drastic step of flinging my light blanket off me, onto the floor beside my bed. The chill from my air conditioning prickles my skin, and without my blanket, I’m not going to be able to comfortably get back to sleep.
Good.
I don’t want to get up. I don’t want to go out into the world today. I don’t want to think about what I’m going to do with my life now that my dream of figure skating has been ripped away from me. I don’t want to think about the new life I’m going to need to build for myself.
But I have to. There’s no other choice.
So, I sit up. I roll off my bed. I stand on my feet.
My right knee aches a little. Not so much that it hobbles my walking. The doctors warned me to expect that this winter, though.
It’ll be the first winter since after the accident; since the car crash that injured my knee badly enough to put an end to my dream of a future in competitive figure skating.
The doctors were unanimous that the injury would make that impossible—that it meant the end of the thing I loved more than anything else, the thing I dedicated my life to. There’s just no way that my knee can support the high impact jumps and leaps, the regular falls, and all the other physical punishment on the bones and joints that comes with figure skating.
A lot of people think figure skating is safe. Easy. That it’s not physical. That it doesn’t hurt. Those people wouldn’t last a day on the ice.
And now, thanks to the driver who plowed into the car I was riding in at the beginning of last semester, neither can I.
Oh, I can still skate. Glide around on the rink a little bit. But the days of the high-risk, high-reward jumps and spins that made me a rising star in the world of figure skating, that got me a scholarship at Blairwood University in Maine, home to the best college competitive figure skating program in the country, are over.
Over. My stomach twists as I think of the word.
I force myself to brush my teeth and get dressed for the day.
I’m not in Maine anymore. I’m no longer a Blairwood student.
With my injury ending my competitive skating career, Blairwood rescinded my scholarship. I could’ve taken out a loan for tuition, or applied for non-athletic scholarships, and remained a student there for my senior year.
But after everything that happened, I wanted to get away.
My pairs skating partner, Blake, was also my boyfriend. About a month after my accident, he dumped me to get with his new skating partner, Michelle. Another former friend of mine.
Pretty much all my friends at Blairwood were from the skating team.
Skating can be an insular world. When you’re putting so much of your time, your energy, and your passion into something, it’s natural that friendships and relationships form more readily within the confines of that world than beyond them.
Once I was no longer a figure skater, I was no longer one of them.
No one said that. I don’t know if anyone eventhoughtit, really. But I felt it.
It was different around them. There was a distance that wasn’t there before. They were still in a world that I just wasn’t a part of anymore.
And since my whole reason for being in Blairwood was to keep chasing my dream, staying there after that dream got snatched away just felt too painful.
So, I transferred to a college close to where I grew up. Ridley University in Pennsylvania.
I’m still majoring in English, which was my major at Blairwood. But back then, I didn’t anticipate ever really relying on my academic major. I was working towards a career in figure skating.
Now, I need to start thinking about what I’m actually going to do with this English degree.
Stay in school an extra year or two and get a teaching degree along with it? Study for the LSAT and try for law school? I have no idea.
My parents have floated the idea of coaching figure skating, but I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to be around figure skating my whole life when I can’t do it myself.
Still, I agreed to take a tentative first step towards trying that out.
