Perfect Ninety

-4

My alarm went off At 4:45 in the morning, 2 hours before I actually needed to be up. Scratch that, too early for any creature on this Earth to be awake. Especially considering that my bus doesn't pick me up until 6:50 and school doesn't officially start its jail schedule until 7:30. I groggily hit the snooze button, which ended the delightful song that was playing ("Seventeen Again.") and just lay. I subconsciously began picking at a blister on my wrist and let my eyes adjust to the darkness and the abrupt change from night dreaming to morning thinking--attempting to distract myself from assessing how sore my body was. I thought about the day before--The pretentious kids in Honors Biology passing around a Sprite bottle full of vodka and teasing me for not wanting any. I thought about the test I have to take today which I never intended to study for ; the principal smiling at me for once and me wondering if he'd ever do it again. He most likely wouldn't, his happy prescription probably ran out. It's rare for any type of principal to smile. It's as if they realize their job and frown at the 'dumb hormonal kids'. Maybe I should have just left it at yesterday so I wouldn't have such high hopes for today. I shake my head as if that stops me from thinking about a certain topic--which usually works.

Still laying down, I decide to look around my room, only because it would pointless to go back to sleep for only about 3 minutes and 3, 2, 1 seconds. I stare at my sheets, which were hot pink with flowers and even though it was too dark to properly see the shapes, they sort of looked like something I drew with my left hand. I looked at my walls, which in this light were a non-existent shade of blue. Well, my curtains were dark blue and assisted in giving my under-lit room a beautiful tinted shade of "I-Hope-You-Know-Your-Desk-Is-Actually-Right-In-Front-Of-Your-Bed-So-Don't-Bump-Into-It-Ha-Ha."

My alarm went off again--my five minutes already were up. I don't understand how time goes by so quickly when you need to get ready for school. I pressed the "off" button then I sighed which was followed by a yawn. I kicked my feet over the edge of the bed and walk towards my dresser. Walking around with the lights off gave my room this feeling like it is completely empty yet totally crowded. Like walking with your eyes closed. You know where everything is but you can't find them. That just shows you, no matter how used you are to your routine, it still feels new. I feel my hands around for my jogging pants and slip into them. It doesn't matter what I'm wearing because I'm not going to school yet.

My morning ritual is very simple yet complicated. I've been doing this for years but I have just recently mastered it. I don't get ready like some girls, five hours before the bus comes to just bury my face in makeup or two minutes before because I was up late on Netflix. ( Both of which I do not do)

My mom forces me to do these yoga classes from a video. She is obviously overly-demanding of me and thinks gymnastics does not end after you leave the gym. If I ask her for a break, she'll probably cry and say that I'm giving up. It's probably more her dream than mine. She ordered a video guide for me when I was 11 and I wasn't too pleased to hear that I would have to wake up over an hour than my usual time.

"Anna, don't you want to be a professional gymnast?" She asked me that day.

"Sure Mom, but I should not have to work myself like this," I replied. Oh little did I know back then that the routines would just get harder.

"I don't want you to fail, you are good enough to have a future and actually finish college at the right time. If you do this, you will ahead of your friends." She pleaded. I like how she said 'if' like I had a choice.

"I am not about to be stressed out anymore than I am, Mom! Don't you care?" I shouted.

"Not really and go up to your room and go to bed and take the video with you and trust me, I'll know if you did it or not."

I started to roll my eyes, snatched the stupid DVD from her mom hands and stormed off. I heard my dad saying, ''You shouldn't put too much pressure on her--"

Then I heard my mom say, "--She needs to know how tough the real world will be and how demanding life is."

To this day she doesn't know I heard that last part and I use that to motivate me. Trust me, I think we all know how 'tough' the real world is and parents always think that because we are kids, we have no idea.

While I was in my room that night--my obsession at the time was Hannah Montana so you can guess the theme of my room--I read the DVD over and over again. Front, back, I was even reading the disc. It kept advertising some crap about the lungs staying centered and stamina. The yoga was supposed to improve allover flexibility. Part of me wondered if the girl on the front ever even attempted a cartwheel in her life. Or if this disc was actually for another sport.

Maybe it wasn't so bad, I thought. Maybe my mom actually cares--in her own obsessive way.

The next morning I woke up at 5:30, turned the TV on and put the DVD into the DVD/Cassette Player in my room.

I did the poses I was instructed to do: Downward dog, plank, knee high, bent knee, knee circles, knee-to-nose, cobra and plank. Then I had to do stretches like the bound angle posture and the tree pose. I voluntarily did my right, left, and center splits at the end. I started to get used to it and allowed it into my schedule.

Of course when I got to school, I had a killer headache. Pain never matters to people because they all have a story prepared to one-up you. If you just bring up having a headache to anybody, they'll go on this tangent and say something like 'I have chronic migraine. I have it worse than you. I have insomnia.' Yeah, well no one cares. If they did, there'd be an official cure for insomnia and there would be no pain, emotional or physical. It doesn't even matter what you have, they'll find a way to rub their situation in anybody's face.

Anyway, at the time, I felt it was a stupid ritual and I doubted other gymnasts actually did yoga. I didn't see any benefits in doing it and felt like it was an insult for my mom to even show me the DVD. Like I wasn't a good enough in gymnastics so I have to take amateur classes on the side or something. I'm not going to tell too many people that I do 'yoga' because everybody thinks that just because they slip on a pair of yoga pants, that they're an athlete. Which is disparage to people who actually work.

Now that I am in high school, and have to wake up earlier anyway, I don't really mind having to stretch. You get used to people's expectations of you when you are the so-called 'perfectionist' on the team. My mind is usually somewhere else when I do the yoga video anyway. Even though it's barely a whole hour, it seems that it helps only my flexibility--even though I am constantly complimented on every aspect of my abilities. I have told my mom that I would rather wake up early to work on technique not flexibility. You could compete and do these amazing tricks but if the technique is bad it costs you points. That's what scares me, that one day I will stop being the role model on the team everyone is forced to look up to because frankly, I like the attention. It's not like my mom is going to know that I've been doing the same beginner workout for 4 years, she just knows that I am waking up earlier than needed to do unsupervised yoga for a sport that is misunderstood.