"A dancer, and gymnast, can never be satisfied with what they can do."
She said it through a chat. I can only imagine what her face was like when she typed it though. Tittering about front walk-overs, handstands, doing lefty splits more easily, she did not sound like a 9 year old, soon turning 10 come September. She was older. She was my age, at that moment. And I, too, was her age.
She complained about how others were better, how she could only do handstands for a few seconds. She did not get what made others better, what made their actions so much more elegant or more gentle. But she knew that it required "lots of hard, hard work."
Even then, she was stretching. "If I don't stretch, everything feels sore." she said. "So, I stretch randomly."
According to her, there was no perfection. Or rather, no one achieved it. After all, the point of dancing is for improvement. What good is something that was already perfect? Perfection meant finality; all you had to do was maintain the state. There was no growth. There was no creativity. There was just...boredom.
At this moment, she stopped chatting, as if waiting for me to refute her. It was not a challenge. She wanted me to understand. And then realizing I did not, she continued on, treating me as if I were her equal, her age, the same type of person.
But by then, she was older than me. Far older than me.
Her birthday is in a month's time. I wonder how much older she'll be by then.
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