Grace (Kim Zmeskal, 1992 Barcelona)...

            

She is a pixie. She is sprite. She is floating. She is above hovering above a nativity trough\ harboring an arena of light. Her body, incubating aerially through celestial trimesters as she sprints and swirls over the topography of the matt landing with the equipoise of angels, the prints of her feet creating sonnets in the lithe prints of the mat.

It’s like she is a caffeinated butterfly one second then a Greek goddess the next.

 I am fifteen. I am mesmerized. I can’t stop looking at her. I can’t stop thinking about the hours of work she has invested in her craft while inwardly correlating it to that of my own athletic devotion.

She is from Texas.

She is petite.

The burly moustache of her Russian coach  on the sidelines goading her gratitude.

She is scaling the clefs of unknown sheet music.

 

She is on the cover of Time magazine. She is on the cover of Newsweek. Her body is forming Sanskrit, forming origami postures forming mathematical greater and less than signs on the marrow of the balance bam on the cover of the TV Guide at  my Grandmother's house/ 

She decimated the Nationals in Paris the year before leading from prologue to punctuation.

Everyone is saying that she is the greatest female US gymnast since Mary Lou.

 

Somehow she is able to continentally sweep across the mat without touching it. Her body giving the middle finger to gravity, denying the  mathematical tribunal of physics, effortlessly flapping without wings, an aesthetic blur,  her lower limbs transitioning into an orb of whirling light, a pinwheel locked in the middle of a tornado whistling out a swan song of peace before it explodes into a million variegated flecks.

She is flouncing. She is forming alphabetical configurations with her body as she floats across the pond of the matt, her auburn hair plaited, adorned in a singular white leotard that looks like it was commissioned by NASA,  sprinting with her hands, cartwheeling. Free falling in a skipping pounce, posing, transitioning into a Greek statue, pensive, before accelerating, a trapeze  with no apparel, taking off in pinwheels and furling grace.

 

 

I can’t stop looking at the screen.

I can’t stop falling just a little bit in love.