There is nothing more brilliant than an ice skating rink. Like an earth bound moon, it is a disc of opacity, a cold frozen space. First setting out onto it is the hardest part. It is slippery and smooth, a feat of balance, a trick of the body to have faith where wobbling could win out. It's easy to fall, the hard part is staying up.
The coldness is assaulting. It makes you breathe different, it makes you want to move, it chases you around the rink. It makes you wonder what are you doing this for?
Being in the middle just means you have to keep going, no turning back, cutting a path into the ice with skate shoes, deadly weapons of heft and sharpness required to do what looks to an observer easy simple movements. Because it is easy after a while, after you get used to it, after the coldness squeezes you so hard it warms you up.
I didn't know how to skate very well. Even though I'd done it before and it looked easy when I saw everyone else doing it, I couldn't get the hang of it. I wobbled, I fell, I bloodied up the ice. And yet, I still get up and keep trying.
What amazes me most is not just the rink itself, but also the machine that comes to spray it with water and spread it into the cuts and lacerations of that frozen disc. To fill in all the hurt and the pain, to freeze it over so it can be cut up again, what a poetic life the ice skating rink leads, with never a complaint or a sad note, just that coldness that is at once slightly disarming but mostly exhilarating.
