Ceinture Noir

I’ve been cleaning out my closet in preparation for leaving. Of course, one anticipates poring over old photo albums and diaries. But one doesn’t necessarily expect to find an item as curious as a black belt in Taekwondo. I got it in eighth grade. Of course, it’s exactly the kind of thing that doesn’t mean anything in eighth grade. But I got it, all right.

If people ever ask me how long it took to get it, I usually say two years. It was really more like a year and a half, but what are you supposed to say to people who are expecting a story of six years’ devoted practice, maybe ten? Their face falls the slightest bit, but they recover quickly, and, hoping to move onto something more fun, ask a question like “So can you do like backflips or anything?” And, with a grimace, it is “No, we didn’t really get into any fancy tricks like that, it was more like getting really good at the basics.”

“Oh, ok. Right. But if I went to attack you, you could injure me, right? I mean, could you, like, kill me?”

I smile to myself. “Well, maybe when I was more in practice.” As in eighth grade.

Then they ask me if I can do a trick, but unfortunately my skirt prevents me from showing off my killer jumping round kick. And then the subject is never broached again.

It’s a silly little scenario, but it leaves a strange taste in my mouth. It’s a joke now, but that’s just it. It wasn’t a trifle at the time. It may have been just eighteen months, but they were hard won. My body doesn’t listen very well, and it was one of the most trying experiences of my life. I have always been a perfectionist, and it killed me when I couldn’t break the board or get the move right. I wept through my sweat, and I learned to love my instructors even more than my beloved schoolteachers. And for all that, I was good, by fragile eighth grade girl standards. It meant the world to me when my instructors would hand me those belts—that I, a girl so easily conquered by feelings and circumstance, had become a conqueror.

And I never went back after they handed me that black belt. The thought brings a tear to my eye even now. I was done with it. I let it all slide down the tube of my memory. The moves and forms that came so easily to me have all melted out of my mind. The instructors haven’t. They remain crystallized, forever associated with certain mannerisms, sayings, kindnesses—the impressions left on the heart of a growing girl. If I saw any of them tomorrow at the grocery store, I wouldn’t know what do say. They wouldn’t remember me.

How many achievements in our lives slip away from us the moment we earn them? How many communities do we abandon, never to see those faces again? How many of us are merely nomads, migrating from place to place, putting all our energies into phases remembered only by mementoes found in moving boxes? Does everybody have a black belt gathering dust?

Sometimes I wonder if human actions are really just like taking photographs to put in a shoe box, where not everything is in order and a lot of things get lost.