Not all bones break in one clean snap.  Sometimes, injuries are messier than that. Sometimes love is messier than that.

From eighth grade to sophomore year of high school volleyball blossomed into my first love. I played year round, fifteen hours a week for school and six hours a week for club. Most of my friends played volleyball, most of my free time went to volleyball, and eventually most of my heart fell in love with volleyball.  Until sophomore year.

It was the Tuesday before Presidents weekend, 2014, when I first felt a soreness in my back.  It started as a nuisance that progressed to an ache that progressed to a stabbing sensation.  That weekend I spent the majority of my time in the medical tent.

The months that followed did not consist of volleyball so much as they did of doctors.  I spent my six hours a week allotted to my favorite sport on the sidelines and alone.  I blamed myself for my inability to perform.

There is nothing worse than blaming yourself for something that is not your fault.

Not until August did I discover what is wrong with my back.  I have a stress fracture in my spine, the product of putting too much pressure on a bone, consistently, over a long period of time.  Eventually, anything you put under enough pressure will break.

So I took a month off from volleyball, to heal my spine and strengthen my lumbar muscles. It just so happened that tryouts for school season were the day after my month was up.

At this point I’d like to tell you that my spine had repaired itself and that after four long months I returned to the sport that put air in my lungs and blood in my veins, but I can’t.  I can’t tell you that because only half of it is true.  I did return to volleyball, one last time, for one last season, but I wasn’t better and I wasn’t happy.  And for another year I spent my time looking for cures to a fractured spine and a broken heart.

It’s still hard to hear from doctors that I should be better, but I’m not.

It became increasingly clear to me that I had to give up volleyball because the agony I endured over it’s absence outweighed any reward I could gain from its return.

I’ll always have unfinished business with volleyball, but it’s how I let that unfinished business affect me that determines whether I fail again.  Because failure isn’t absolute in my case.  It’s tiny bits and pieces of a heart reluctant to fall in love with anything ever again.

A lot of people think of failure as giving up, and for a year and a half I entrapped myself in the dangerous narrative that if I just tried harder, I could fix my spine.  But I had to give up volleyball.  I had to give up volleyball because the more I let its toxicity prevent me from moving on, the more I failed at living my life.

And in some ways, I have moved on. In some ways I’ve found new outlets for pain; I started writing poetry.  From far away, a certain type of poetry looks like screaming, and like most who lost their first love, I had some screaming to do.  Poetry helped me express the pain of lost love and messy endings and the volleyball-sized crater in chest.  Now, it also helps me express the excitement of new love, shaky starts, and the ability to fill that crater with words.

I will get better, just not in the sense that my spine is going to heal perfectly and I’ll play volleyball again.  I will get better in the sense that my heart is going to heal imperfectly, and maybe sometime in the future I’ll love writing just as much as I did volleyball.