autobiography

“Now next on the floor are the Cheerleaders from W.T. Woodson High School,” the announcers exclaimed. Then the crowd goes wild! Screaming fans and parents stand up, cheering and clapping as they wait to see their daughters perform the routine they worked four long months to perfect.  As soon as I hear the fans and our school name announced, my heart starts to beat like crazy.

I think to myself, “We are up next after this team.  We’re going in less than five minutes.  Relax, relax.”  The adrenaline is pumping into my blood and I can no longer hear myself think.  My divas, my teammates, my family huddles together in a group as our captains and coaches give us a couple last words of wisdom.

“You’ve all worked extremely hard these past four months.  It’s too late to fix anything now.  By now you’re bodies will remember the routine much better than your minds.  So Relax.  Take a deep breath and let out all the stress and worries and just let your bodies do what it needs to do.  Let your minds go blank.  It doesn’t matter whether we win or lose.  Just make this a performance that you won’t regret!” our coaches say to us.  And just like that, it’s time for my team to go out and perform.  I run out with my team to the dirty, blue mats lying dead center of the huge gymnasium.  I can see the fans cheering, but my mind numbs so I can’t hear them.

All of the sudden, the room gets so quiet; you could feel the tension in the air.

“Let’s go Divas!” yells my coach, then “five, six, seven, eight,” we start and my mind goes blank.

Now a year later, all I remember is what I remember watching in the videos.   I don’t remember how we did, what score we received, or even what routine goes with which competition and what year I performed each routine.  All I remember is the music.  And just like my coaches said, my body remembers.  My body remembers everything.  Even if only the first measure of a song is played on the radio, or I hear just a snippet of a song that was a part of my cheer routine, my body, not my mind, automatically starts counting, “one, two, three, four…” I stand there in a trance like state, going through the motions, stunts, and tumbling through my head and saying the cheer until I finish the four minute routine. I essentially go back in time, to the competition, to the hallway where my team and I waited until it was our turn to compete, to the practice rooms where we spent hour after hour working on our routines, and finally to the gymnasium, on that dirty, old, blue mat where my last memory of the routine lies.

My friends, the ones who’ve known me for years are all used to this part of me, the part of me that waits for someone to turn on a song that was used in my routine so that I could go on a mini time travel trip.  They are used to seeing me randomly performing my cheer routine, by myself, in the middle of a crowded room.  They get embarrassed sometimes and don’t completely understand, but I love that the music takes me back to that time; it takes me back to the smelly, old gym and the dance room where my team, my coaches, and I spend endless hours fixing, fixing, and fixing our routines till they were perfect and suitable to be performed in front of hundreds of fans.  The music allows me to relive all the pain, the misery, and the anger that cheering brought along with it, but it also fulfills me with a sense of pride and accomplishment, for though I spent hours and hours at practice, and then afterwards, I spend hours and hours at night working on school work, sacrifice sleep, I loved cheering and I love traveling back in time and reliving my cheering days by listening to music.

The most recent time trip I went on was here in Richmond.  I was at the gym working out with my friends, when we all decided to go relax and dance a little in the dance room.  There, we started dancing to the very popular Korean song Gangnam Style the singer Psy.  When we were all tired of listening to this song, my friend arbitrarily asked me to teach her how to do my cheer routines.  Of course I wasn’t able to teach her how to stunt and throw people into the air nor could I teach her how to do a round-off, back-hand-spring, and tucks, but I taught her how to do the next best thing.

“Five, six, seven, eight,” I said, and then I took a step out to the right and started slowly going through the motions of the dance with her.  As I went through the dance, step by step, I mentally relived being a cheerleader.  I saw the crowd cheering in front of me, I saw signs and parents with horns, whistles, and cow bells, and I was brought back to the dirty, blue mat lying in the center of the gymnasium floor.

In retrospect, my coach was right.  Two years ago, in the hallway outside of the gymnasium where my last cheer competition was held, it didn’t matter how many times I reminded myself to keep my legs together in a stunt or how many times I told myself to jump high when I tumbled; my body remembers better than my mind what it has practiced doing for the past four months.  And my body still remembers.  Every time I hear a song that was in my routine, I go back in time.  I remember the moves like I had just got out of practice.