amoureux garçon

Chapter One: La Douleur Exquise

word count: 1,7k

I could have gone months without exercising. If the time to practice arrived my body would have bent over backwards defying what most would've called impossible. It always made me believe that was exactly the reason why I reckoned I was good at playing just at that sport in particular.

How amusing.

As with any sport, risk came along with it. Stretching muscles and every bone in the body to the extreme was harmful. There were endless injuries that could have taken place when playing volleyball. Common damages while playing volleyball could have been grouped into two categories: overuse injuries which had to do with any type of muscle or joint injury, such as a stress fracture, that's caused by repetitive trauma; traumatic injuries which involved physical injuries with a severity which requires immediate medical attention.

There was something in me that just fought, yearning for my skin to be stretched because there was a big endless void in me where once I felt something, almost everything and playing volleyball just helped me drift my thoughts away from it. Divert my thoughts from the fact that I couldn't almost feel anything.
There were times where I just knew that I didn't get the ambition to choose the sport, it was solely a hobby to bring a sense of recreation and liberation to minimize the impact of the persistent stress I was going through.

Waking up first in the morning, barely trying to exercise and most important out of all, loud music playing in the background in my headphones. All that just not to think too much. I assumed that waking up earlier than everyone in the morning was good, that it made me a better person to first deal with myself and then others, to have the illusion that all the hours spent by myself could merely help me recover from my constant thinking.

"Fear isn't welcome here."
The new coach didn't even bother presenting herself, instead, her lips came apart just for her to state three words. Fear wasn't welcome. Her voice was soothing and deep; she'd drunkenly emphasise the words that came out of her lips. No roundabout her name or who exactly she was or what we would have done, for the incoming weeks with her as our new coach. None of that.

Fear wasn't welcome there.

Coach was fear itself.

She was different. Coach enjoyed wearing short satin skirts, sometimes she'd wear a white or black corset to match with the overall polished look of her skirt and she'd wear satin black ballet flats—which didn't seem to fit well at all with the type of sport we played and I wondered if she used to be a ballerina. Her long silky black-charcoal hair was always tied up; defying gravity whenever no shorter strands of hair would fall over her pale face.

"It isn't welcome, even when the volleyball is about to hit you right in the face because there are hands positions for that, pass the ball back right behind the net. You stop that ball from fracturing your nose and giving you a black eye!"

"Yes—"

"Coach. Kavinsky, Edith Kavinsky."

"Yes, coach!"

"The ball is always going to get hit by me, that's what you girls should be thinking. The ball will always get to me! When the opposite team has the ball it'll always come back to me!"

I could have listened to her talking—about what seemed more to be a mixture of inspirational speeches and scoldings—for about hours and hours rather than spend ten to twelve hours practising. Stretching till the point of almost breaking my bones, till the point of feeling sore—during a game instead of the day after. Her voice was enough.

"There are people out there that take this little hobby as a serious career, you must have heard it a million times: with little to no tolerance for procrastination!" Swaying her hips she strode over to me, with a strict look on her face she passed her tongue across her top teeth, her lips were pale—due to the cold weather so sometimes she'd often bite down on them to get the blood flowing—straight lifted thin eyebrows that complimented her perfect feline facial structure.