C.W. #1

Once upon a time there was a teenaged girl. We'll call her Smiley. Now, on the surface Smiley may have seemed like your typical sixteen-year old. She went to school, she drove a car (not without incidents, but that is a story for another time), and she talked on the phone endlessly. No one really knows what she was talking about for all of those hours every single night. It really is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of our time.

What made Smiley different from the rest of her school-going, scary car-driving, nonstop phone-talking friends was the fact that her life really was not centered on any of those things. They were a part of it, yes, and if you had asked her she probably would not have wanted to give up any one of them. (No, not even the school part. Yet another mystery of our time.) But take away one of those things and she would have survived. What set Smiley apart from her peers was the one thing that could not be taken away.

Could it be food? Water? Love? No, Smiley did not care about those things. Well, she did, but she did not need them. What, you ask? That makes no sense at all. Of course she needed food and water or she would not be alive. And all of us need love. Isn't that what every song played on the radio is saying?

Scientifically speaking, Smiley did need these things. But they were secondary. She did not get up in the morning because she could not wait to have some water. She woke up because of gymnastics. She did not eat breakfast because she loved food. She ate it because she needed energy to do gymnastics. And love? The word only begins to describe how she felt about this thing that some may call a hobby. For her it was much more than a sport, much more than just a part of her life. It was, in fact, what she lived for.

But, as we know all too well, life is about change. Sometimes we choose this change, but most of the time it is thrust upon us. Smiley knew that things would change eventually. Her body wouldn't be able to handle the demands of the sport forever. But she couldn't have predicted, wouldn't have wanted to have predicted, how soon that change would actually come.