Circles

Tck. Her eyes follow the big imaginary circle. Tck. The white handles are well worn, years of dirt in the ridges. Tck. The rope is that medium purple, not dark and rich but also not pastel. It’s a kids' toy purple. Tck. The rhythmic noise blends with giggles and the sounds of little brothers. Tck.

Being nine is fun. Girls aren’t too mean yet and the world feels endlessly interesting. Just like all her friends, she loves jumping, but her favorite is turning. She’s memorized which friends are the right height for maximum turning potential and trained the new and less-experienced neighbors on the “right” way to turn.

The rope should never hit the ground. It’s amazing how many people don’t know this. A brush. That’s all you want from a rope. The faintest brush on the concrete. A turner’s job isn’t to “get low” for the jumper. They shouldn’t try to predict the next jump and adjust their turn. She will tell anyone who will listen that her job, their job, is to paint a perfect, gentle, rhythmic circle. Steady. 

There is something about being the one to make the magic happen. She’s lifting the world off the ground for a moment. She’s moving air, making joy. If a jumper has two good turners she should be able to close her eyes and not miss a beat. That’s how consistent a good turner is. And she is a good turner. 

When they are all too out of breath, they run inside for Capri Suns and hit play on the VCR. While the other girls watch the showy trick jumpers, she focuses on the edges of the screen. How are the turners holding their wrists? How are they counting? How do they manage to pause the rope in mid-air like that? She sits mesmerized at the perfect arches they create.

Sometimes in the winter, her uncle comes to clean the driveway just so she can jump. He scoops snow and checks for ice. She runs and knocks on doors. 

“Today! Hurry!” 

She always starts with gloves her mom has shoved on her hands, but by the second jumper they are stripped off, thrown in the snow, soon to be soaked. Mom was a jumper growing up. Mom just doesn’t understand how important your grip is. 

When life feels not right, she jumps. When a test is hard or the teacher embarrasses her in front of her friends, she jumps. When Mom and Dad get in a fight, she jumps. When her favorite sweater gets a hole in it, tck tck tck. Even alone, jumper and turner, tck, tck, tck, she feels the peace of perfect circles.

Circles themselves become important to her. She does a series of watercolor circles in 7th grade art class. Pinks and blues, soft swishes, airy and light. She dreams in circles, begins to wonder about the rhythmic nature of life. In a navy blue hardback journal she writes about how everything seems connected. She’s noticing the tck, tck, tck of the world around her. It’s fascinating, soothing.

At some point she stops jumping, stops turning. By high school jumping rope is a consequence for being tardy. By twenty-three she jumps because her body is a disappointment. Tck, tck, tck. Her earliest memory of community, of wonder, of joy; now a lonely obligation. There are no purple ropes anymore—only black and red, worn and sweaty, tossed into a black milk crate by people she sees but does not know. Unknown. This circle is so unknown.

At thirty she reads bestselling books about the value of play and fun in our adult lives. She finds her journal and reads excerpts to a woman she pays $120 an hour to to listen. They talk about her childhood, Capri Suns and neighborhood best friends. About art class and watercolor circles. Each week she thinks about jumping, about turning, but she doesn’t say it. She can see the purple rope and its perfect arches, but she can’t put words to it. It’s too tender, too personal, too painfully nostalgic.

Life is bringing her back around, circling her back to winter driveways and quiet solo jumps, but the circling is work. Her wrists are tired and her turns feel off. The circle has taken things from her that her nine-year-old self could never have imagined. She thought the world was steady, that the arches wouldn’t falter. She misses the way her body used to move, free and uninhibited. She misses her wrists swishing paint across a page, fully present to her circles, unaware of people’s opinions and pressure. She misses turning, her belief that she could make something in the world. Something that created space for other people to be, to move and jump and laugh and fail and celebrate. She misses herself. Tck, tck, tck.

She’s home for Grandma’s birthday. Seventy-five is not something you miss. Her room has been overtaken by craft supplies, but they’ve managed to squeeze an air mattress in between the plastic tubs. 

She’s circled back around. 

It isn’t by accident that she finds the rope. She has come with a mission—a task from her therapist, a kindness to her inner child. She has begun to tell the stories of the rope—how it shaped her and eventually betrayed her. How she feels a loss that seems so silly. How her circle has felt off for over a decade, rope frayed and laid aside. 

She’s grown to fit the purple rope. Once much too long for a solo jump, the rope she circled with friends for years welcomes her body back. She sneaks to the back porch—the front driveway much too visible for this reunion. Like old friends embracing, her hands remember the grips. She centers herself on the rope, then closes her eyes. 

“If a jumper has two good turners she should be able to close her eyes and not miss a beat.” 

And she doesn’t.