You peeled pieces of skin the size of coins clean off your hands, spat on the red flesh underneath and tamped out the soon-to-come blood with a dry heap of chalk. Your wrists bruised for years as you tightened and re-tightened the grips over them relentlessly, needing the bones to scrape the sides to feel secure enough. Your brain abandoned reason, logic. You convinced yourself that somersaults on a surface half as wide as this sheet of paper made sense, and that you should do them. All for me.

 

And these are the good parts. These are the parts you smile about when you think of me: The resiliency and toughness you learned. The hard work you put in to be able to fly.

 

But in the very same breath that I made you fall in love with flying, I demanded perfection all the way through. Getting up in the air was meaningless without a stuck landing. Skills were pointless without correct form. Every strand of hair had to be carefully slicked down to your scalp.

 

And perfection is a dangerous lesson to teach little girls.

 

Straighten your legs. Point your toes. Chin up. Back flat. Stomach tucked in. Shoulders back. Wait a half second longer to twist. Spot your landing a millisecond earlier. But don’t forget to still point your toes. Look calmer, look stronger. Look better, do better. I had an endless list of demands for you to meet. At least I was transparent, okay? I never lied about the perfection I expected from you. Not once.

 

But perfection is a finicky substance, and it turns out it's quite hard to scrape away once it lands somewhere. It coated your existence the way chalk coated your hands while working bars, lazily sifting into every crack and crevice of your skin. No matter how many times you washed your rhinestone-studded leotards, the smell lingered. It made its way into your bag, snug up against ankle braces and medical tape, not willing to let you get away from it. Perfection settled into every corner of your life. Of you.

 

I placed numeric value on everything you gave me, highlighting exactly where you fell short. To be scored out of a 10 was to be reminded time and time again that you were not a 10. You were less than 10. Imperfect.

 

You began to measure your life in deductions, in the difference between reality and perfection. A 94 on a test was never an A, it was a six-point deficit in your academic ability, and you weren’t good enough. Thirteen hundred calories was 100 too many of your regimented 1200, and you weren’t good enough. Arriving at 5:31pm instead of 5:30 was sixty seconds of delayed time but felt like sixty lifetimes of still never. being. good. enough. It had everything to do with my looming, restrictive hold on your life, always mercilessly dictating standards you could never meet, and nothing to do with your mother driving too slow. I’m sorry.

 

I know you still don’t open your boxes of medals or trophies. How could you? You know that even your gold ones have your score stuck to the back from the label-maker you so diligently used, hunched over on your bedroom floor making sure you would never forget the score of each award. Numbers I gave you. Values you clung to, like the bar, until your hands were too bloodied and raw to keep going. Values you cannot look at today, because you will immediately feel inadequate.

 

And I know you haven’t once looked through the bottom right dresser drawer that holds your leotards. You are scared that if you do you might smell chalk dust remnants or worse, the tears that soaked into the fabric when you went to the bathroom. Bare feet on the tile floor, hands clenching the sides of the sink to stop shaking, while you studied the bags under your eyes and desperately tried to recall why you put yourself through me in the first place. Few sports make their own athletes terrified of them the way I do.

 

But I'm most sorry for dividing you. There is a version of you who lives freely today while the other one suffocates under your box of medals, beneath the trophies, wondering how she became a relic that cannot be let out of your childhood closet.

 

Although you do not let her see the light of day, and you yourself have not seen her in years, you still think about her. Incessantly. Obsessively. Usually when you are turning in an assignment late, or finding out about a bad grade, or thinking of another excuse as to why you need to call out of work Friday morning without telling them you are hungover. Especially when your parents ask why you still don’t have an internship lined up or a plan for after your rapidly approaching graduation date.

 

You know that she still has a 4.0 and three diligently mapped out career plans, tucked in a folder beside her and the medals. But you also know that is all she has. She doesn’t have friends, she doesn’t know how to say yes to something spontaneous, and she can’t see anything in the darkness besides the deductions. The imperfections.

 

So you keep her where she is, analyzing scores in her free time and probably lining them up worst to best, best to worst, with the little light that seeps in from under the door. Taking scrupulous notes on how to improve, no doubt. Constantly calculating how to close the gap between reality and perfection and make them one and the same.

 

And I am the reason she must stay locked up. That she does not know how to function effectively. Or happily. For all the balance I required you to have on beam, I could never teach you the one form of balance your life was desperately void of: Pushing yourself, yet also loving yourself.

 

You refuse to let your mother move the boxes or their unseen contents. You refuse to let her donate the untouched leotards. In the way you can still smell the chalk that surely lingers in their corners, you can still see the little girl you were who fell in love with challenges and hard work. The girl who diligently corrected the slightest movements of her routines. The girl who did extra push-ups and held a stuck landing. The girl who always wanted to be good enough.

 

You grew up being told nobody’s perfect. That perfection doesn’t exist. But you joined a sport because you wanted to fly and suddenly it was all there was.