But c’mon. That’s an awfully small needle to thread. And the eye of that needle just got smaller and smaller the more successful I became.

I could torture my body all day—making my muscles so tired that my whole body felt heavy. And then in just a few minutes, Marco could lighten every limb, loosen my chest.

We live in a world where exceptional women have to sit around waiting for mediocre men.

I found myself closing my eyes, on the verge of surrendering.

Every night, I grab his hand and pull him inside and bring him to my bedroom. And every night, he presses himself against me and kisses my neck and makes me wonder if anyone has ever survived jumping off the edge of a cliff.

It seems obvious to me now that my dad was likely stretched so tight he could nearly have snapped.

I keep thinking, I don’t cry on the court. I don’t cry on the court. But then I think, Maybe it’s a lie that you have to keep doing what you have always done. That you have to be able to draw a straight line from how you acted yesterday to how you’ll act tomorrow. You don’t have to be consistent. You can change, I think. Just because you want to.

My older self knows that you must stop—in the middle of the chaos—to take in the world around you. To breathe in deeply, smell the sunscreen and the rubber of the ball, let the breeze blow across your neck, feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. In this respect, I love the way the world has aged me.

“Just forget it,” he says. And then he turns his back to me and fluffs his pillow angrily. And I smile to myself because you don’t fluff a pillow you’re not planning to sleep on.