My life is like a stereotypical love story. I believe in love at first sight and I have never moved past my first love. While I am the star of my own romantic tragedy, my love is actually of a different kind. My first love wasn’t a person or a pet. It wasn’t even living. It was an idea, a game. It was soccer. Imagine if you could poll any teenage girl out there about their first love. What would you get? Would you maybe get a couple of names or maybe the age they were when they met their supposed “significant other”? But for me, soccer has always been the Juliet to my Romeo. Sure, like any other girl, I’ve chased after boys whose names I have long forgotten, but the name of my first and only true love has been engraved in my heart for an eternity.

This whole “love-at-first-sight” mess all started when I was seven. It was the fall of 2008 my parents and the parents of two of my friends met together and decided that they were going to sign us up on the same team to play soccer at our local YMCA. Being a second grader at the time, I didn’t have a single care in the world so I just went with it. Eventually, the first practice arrived. I showed up in a t-shirt, athletic shorts, and tennis shoes, no ball, no shin guards, no cleats, just going with the flow. The first practice eventually evolved into the first game, the second practice, the second game, and so on. My friends dropped out one by one over time, but I remained. I made new friends who I would eventually become classmates with now in high school. Over the seasons, spring and fall, the original white team t-shirt evolved into jerseys from yellow, to grey, to red, before settling to black. My number changed and my position rotated with the change of teams and coaches, left midfielder, left forward, right defender. After seasons of changes, by the fall of 2010, I had reached a semi- permanent position of team Kickers, number thirteen, left right-defender, me.

Before long it was the spring of 2012; my mom had only recently purchased me a pair cleats and I was soon to enter middle school that summer. This was where the glass was shattered. Because they thought I wasn’t any good and I might hurt myself in the heat of competition as I matured my parents they cut me off from soccer. My mom, being a spinal cord and brain injury researcher, made it even more unlikely that I would be able to return to soccer. This absolutely devastated me. I reasoned, begged, pleaded, cried, and tried everything within my eleven-year old capabilities to keep what I considered the only future I had known by my side. I was told to do what I love and soccer was what I loved. I was helpless against their decision, and I hated myself for it.

One of my friends who had quit soccer early on had in turn been swimming for the swim team at that same YMCA. My parents automatically saw this as a perfect opportunity to enroll me for the team. As swim was a non- contact sport and I had already learned to swim early on in my childhood, having a friend on the team was seen as a good compromise for my parents. Swimming cost more but I was being exposed to physical activity and the seasons occurred in summer and winter so I didn’t have to rush to practice after school. But why do I feel like I lost out in this “compromise”? I wasn’t really asked if I wanted to participate but at the same time if I didn’t hold on to swim what else did I have left to hold on? So I joined the YMCA swim team in the summer of 2012.

Swim was unlike soccer. While we were a team, swim lacked the intricate teamwork that soccer had. In swim we all support each other but once we were on the starting block, it was an all-out race for the first place ribbon. The only time there really was teamwork was when the top finishers were assigned point values which were then tallied into a team point total to determine which team won the meet. In soccer, there was dribbling up to the goal, passing to teammates, and celebrating together when the team makes a goal and knowing that you made a contribution to the completion of said goal. In soccer, there were no individual wins, it was a team effort, and that kind of synergy was what swimming lacked and what I yearned for.

Never once did I even try to make the high school soccer league. Instead, I joined the swim team. Now, a sophomore, I sometimes wonder, “Will I look back once graduating high school and regret not even trying out?” All the players play for one of the two elite club soccer teams in our state while I haven’t played so much as a scrimmage game in more than three years. I didn’t think I had the skills to meet the requirements to play for one of the best teams in the state. So I never tried.

To this day I still feel an empty void where soccer used to be. I feel lost without direction in concern with what I want to do in the future. I live in a constant, almost guilt-like reminder to myself of the things I used to have. Every day is like a careful dance upon these dreams, as sharp as shards of glass. I still hold on to swimming, something I've never really felt affinity towards, because I’m afraid there is love there and I cannot see it because I cling to my first love in soccer. Therefore, daily I ask myself, “Is this really worth it?” and daily I tell myself, “Just hold on a little longer. It may be worth it in the end.”