The Negative Space

I read once that we are the things we love. I’m not sure where I read it, or who said it or anything like that, but I think it must be true. After all, when we tell people about ourselves what we really end up talking about is the things we like, its how we define ourselves.

             When I was in the third grade, I was a pianist. I took lessons everyday after school. My teacher had this beautiful wooden piano with all types of carvings in it. We sat together on the bench in the front hallway of her house and she made me play songs out of flimsy books with lots of colors and big font. Every time I left she reminded me to practice when I got home. I played baseball with the neighborhood kids instead. I’d come back the next week and play with ease. She knew I never practiced, she said I could do this thing which she called ‘playing by ear.’ The next year I was finally old enough to play in the school band, but piano was not one of the instruments, I rented a violin from the school.

             The Band practiced during school hours at free time near the end of the day. Weekend and summers left me wanting so I picked up some clubs, golf clubs. My father would take me to the driving range whenever he found the time. I learned how to grip a golf club, how to angle my hips, how to stand. We’d hit shot after shot and the white balls would become smaller as they drifted away until the white specks faded into the slew of others completely indistinguishable. The first time my father took me to a golf course was for a father son tournament, though he made sure to inform me that father daughter groups were also quite welcome. I insisted we play the eighteen-hole course. I held my own, typically running only about a two strokes more than my father per hole. I refused to hit from the women’s tee. When we got to the eighteenth a group of four were on the green. My father told me that I might as well tee off, but I waited, letting the others finish putting. When they were gone I stuck my tee into a nice patch of grass at the men’s tee balancing my ball on top. When I swung there was no friction, just the anomaly of a ten-year-old girl and the perfect shot. Even my father had never gotten a hole in one, but he picked me up in a hug and spun me around in circles. When the leader board was posted, it only showed the top ten teams, we didn’t make the list. I fell out of the habit of golf. We still joke that I could’ve been a prodigy.

             When I was thirteen I loved to dance. My best friend and I would have sleepovers and spend the entire night twirling around to songs on every CD in our collections. She had taken dance classes on and off for years, so she left me borrow a pair of her old dance shoes. We’d go to her front yard hauling her stereo with us, a clunky sliver machine with speakers that looked like bug eyes, big and round. We’d play a song over and over choreographing every move until we agreed on a turn or a kick or some type of fancy footwork. Then we decided that playing pretend was no longer enough. Her mother agreed to drive us to whatever dance studios we could find. We ended up going to seven, taking pamphlets that had different prices for classes that they offered, hip-hop, jazz, lyrical. We decided that even though Jazz was pretty, hip-hop just seemed like a lot more fun. I brought the pamphlets home to my mother and she looked them over carefully. Taking them, she said that she would think about it. I think she was hoping she could kill our little plan softly. But I persisted and she finally revealed that it was just too expensive, it wasn’t something we would be able to afford. Summer was almost over anyway.

             When I was fifteen I picked up books and couldn’t put them down. I got lost in the imaginings of different worlds. I became a space pirate searching for the key to life elsewhere, I became a psychic learning the power of ley lines. I stepped into the minds of many different men and women in many different times. I held these characters close to my heart. But the boys in school cherished John Proctor, Nick Carraway, Jane Eyre. These books were the new gospel and I had seemingly chosen to worship at the throne of a false idol. Our teacher walked into class one day and asked what defines a book as literature. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected that it wasn’t for me.

             I got out of my mind and into my body the day I became an athlete. I joined the high school soccer team. I liked running, liked how strong I felt when I played, how sore my body became after hours of giving it my all. The field was usually mushy and thick with mud because it rained so much that December and the grass was barely there except in small thick patches that could take out your ankles. I was a decent player, no standout on the team, but I had fun. At practice I would measure myself up against the other girls on the team, and I measured up well. When the games against other high schools began, I could feel the heat in my bones, a longing for that competition. I never had a chance to truly compete. There was a comradery between the girls on the team, and I was an outsider. The coach put me on the bench. I tried to explain that it wasn’t my fault, that I was good, they just refused to pass to me. He told me that if I wasn’t getting the ball then there wasn’t a point for me to be out there. The next year I thought about trying out for something like tennis or swimming, but it just didn’t fit, it never felt the same.

             Someone posted something I thought was interesting a while back, it talked about how many of the proverbs we use aren’t the original in full, that because of this the meanings have been skewed over time. Like how we say that ‘curiosity killed the cat. ‘ It said that there was a second part that goes, ‘satisfaction brought it back.’ It seems that we tear apart these beautiful sentiments in order to fit our view of the way we believe the world to be. My favorite restoration though, was that the saying ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. The end it said was ‘better than master of one.’  I think that just because we don’t love something anymore, it doesn’t erase the love we had for it, it doesn’t change how it changed us. I think that whoever said that we are what we love was right, but I also think we are so much more than that.