Rachel Ratajski
“One more time.”
The color guard collectively groaned, and our coach started the music again. This was the fourth “one more time” in a row. We all go into position, took a breath, and spun the same sixteen counts of the routine again.
My freshman year of high school, the first year I was in color guard, my new teammates were quick to educate me that “one more time” never actually meant what our coach promised. It meant that we were doing something wrong, somebody was messing up a move or we were not on the right counts. It meant our coach was not going to let us stop until we were perfect.
*
One more time.
I was becoming very familiar with the wood grain of the door. I heard voices outside my dorm room—voices from the people I had tried to talk to numerous times for the past month, but failed to do so every time. Their muffled conversation told me they were going to get dinner in the dining hall soon. I hadn’t eaten dinner with anyone since coming to college. I desperately wanted to. But there were too many people out there for me to leave my room.
I knew I had to try again though. One more time, try one more time.
Footsteps alerted me to some people leaving, but I heard the girl across the hall say she would catch up in a minute. It was just one person now. I could do it.
I turned the handle I had been unknowingly holding the whole time and slowly pulled the door open. Delaney was sitting at her desk, finishing something up on her laptop. I stood in the doorway for a split moment before finally forcing a jumble of words out of my mouth.
“Um, do you mind if I, uh, eat dinner with you? I heard you all talking about it…”
She turned to look at me. She smiled. “Of course! Rachel, right?”
Her knowing my name surprised me. I didn’t expect that to feel so good. I nodded as she stood up to leave the room. “Let’s go.”
*
“One more time.”
Courtney shoved an Abraham Lincoln shot glass into my hand and poured more fireball into it. It sloshed onto my fingers. Our other roommates held out their shot glasses with enthusiasm, not wanting to miss out on the fun. We wanted to toast moving into our new house. My mouth felt numb as I smiled and raised the glass to clink it against theirs. It made me shudder and gag as I gulped it down as fast as I could. After the initial disgust, we all started laughing again.
I’d never liked shots. But I liked the people I was taking them with.
*
One more time.
I needed to reset. I needed to allow myself one more chance.
The tears were abundant, throat raw from silent gasps, nose running, chest in more emotional than physical pain. My mom was talking to me through the phone, trying to calm me down, trying to talk me through it. I hated calling her like this.
I didn’t have a reason to be sad. Sure, school was stressful, but when is college not? I had five other roommates, and yet I was somehow unbearably lonely. I would succeed in one thing, and my brain would tell me three things I was terrible at. It was like my mind was against me—it couldn’t let me stay happy for long. I’d wake up in a hole for no reason. Some days, it got too much; I’d contemplated things I shouldn’t contemplate. Today was one of those days.
It is hard to give yourself, give life, another chance when you can’t quiet the negative thoughts that are so persistent. For some, it is their undoing. But I needed to keep trying, I always told myself to try one more time when my mind took me to that dark place. It was the only way I knew how to fight it.
Reset.
*
One more time.
I shouldn’t have allowed it to happen again. He leaned in to kiss me, his lips needy, mine desperate for physical attention. I knew it was wrong, taking advantage of his feelings just to satisfy my desire for someone to think I was beautiful or sexy. Justifying it to myself was simple enough—we were clear from the beginning this was never going to be something more; we were both getting what we wanted in a way. Lies, but I believed it. I still should have ended it as soon as he told me he started to fall for me. Maybe I started to like him too, started to feel an emotion I thought for years was unattainable to me. But I couldn’t risk being wrong, so I stuffed those feelings back into the box they had escaped from.
His hands were at the bottom of my shirt. The tips of his fingers slid up my back. So soft, so gentle. There was care in his hands. Not the kind of care you use when your grandparents ask you to get out the good china but the kind of care that results from late night conversations and copious amounts of laughs. The care was still there when he nuzzled his head against my neck the next morning and wrapped his arm around me in a sleepy hug.
It was the kind of care I didn’t deserve, but wasn’t ready to give up yet.
*
“One more time.”
My excitement was palpable as I sat across my grandma at Olive Garden. This was our thing, going out for lunch and talking for hours about life. She wanted to go back-to-school shopping after we finished our meal. Get me a cute top for the first day of my last year of college.
“You have one more year left and then the rest of the world is yours. How have you grown up so fast?”
I smiled. Some parts of the years were blurs, like landscapes outside a car window moving by too fast on the interstate. Other parts I could remember vividly, down to the excited curl of my toes or the cracking sound of a muscle ripping. So many “one more times,” so many more to come.
“I don’t know. But I’m excited to go at it one more time.”
*