After more than twenty-five years, I bought another pair of rollerblades.
Before taking them outside, I put them on inside the house and tried to remember what it felt like to stand on wheels. This was not an especially intelligent test. The floor was marble, which meant the skates behaved nothing like they would on an actual road or path. The wheels slid too easily in some directions and resisted in others.
Still, I pushed away carefully.
The movement felt familiar almost immediately. My balance was not what it had once been, and I was very aware that falling now would probably have more consequences than it did twenty-five years ago. But somewhere beneath the caution, my body seemed to recognise what it was being asked to do.
Then I remembered the more urgent question.
How did I stop?
Going had returned more quickly than stopping. Perhaps that is true of more things than skating.
When I was younger, I skated regularly at Bishan–Ang Mo Kio Park and East Coast Park. I could cross one foot over the other while turning, glide on one leg and balance on individual wheels. I knew how to slide to a stop, although I did not always know the names of the movements I was performing.
I had simply learned them through doing.
The vocabulary came much later. Power stop. T-stop. Slalom. Ploughing. These were formal names for things my body had once discovered through repetition, correction and the need not to crash into whatever happened to be ahead.
For more than twenty-five years, I had not asked those movements to return.
When I finally took the new skates outside, I spent about forty-five minutes going up and down the street. The stretches were short, and I had to turn around just as I began settling into the movement. My shins hurt at first. The muscles were being asked to hold positions they had not been required to hold for a very long time.
After a while, the discomfort eased.
I was still trying to work out how confidently I could stop, but some of the old responses appeared without being consciously summoned. At one point, my body moved into what I later recognised as a power stop. I had not planned it. I was simply slowing down, turning and placing my weight in a way that had once been ordinary.
The movement had returned before the explanation.
That surprised me.
We often speak about memory as though it belongs mainly to the mind. We remember names, events, instructions and facts. But the body appears to keep records of its own. A rhythm, balance or sequence of movement may remain somewhere beneath conscious recall, unavailable until the conditions ask for it again.
I could not have sat in a chair and described precisely how to perform the movements. Yet once I was moving, parts of the knowledge became available.
Not all at once, and not exactly as before. The memory remained, but the body carrying it had changed.
I was older. The strength around the movement had diminished. My reactions were more cautious, and I was more conscious of what might happen if I fell. There was no sensible reason to pretend that twenty-five years had not passed.
But neither had they erased everything.
There was something quietly reassuring in that. Not the motivational promise that we can always become who we once were, because I do not think that is true—or necessarily desirable. I was not returning to the person who had skated at East Coast Park decades ago.
I was meeting something he had left behind in me.
Perhaps that is different from returning.
Returning suggests that the earlier place or person is still waiting unchanged. But time alters both the traveller and the destination. Even when we repeat an old activity, we do so from a life that has continued accumulating experiences, limitations, losses and capacities.
The street was not the park. The short stretch was not an open path. The body was not the same body.
But the wheels still rolled.
What I enjoyed most was the breeze and the feeling of coasting.
That part had not required explanation. Once I gained enough speed to stop concentrating on every small movement, the air moved against me and the skates carried me forward with less effort. For a few moments, I was not evaluating my balance, naming techniques or wondering whether I could stop in time.
I was simply moving.
The stretches were too short for the feeling to last very long. I would begin to settle into the glide, then the end of the street would arrive and I would have to slow down, turn and begin again.
Perhaps that was appropriate.
There was no dramatic recovery of a lost youth. No triumphant return to a former ability. I was going up and down a street while my shins complained, trying not to fall and relearning how to stop.
It was getting dark, which was why I eventually went home. I would probably have continued otherwise.
That surprised me too.
An activity I had not done for more than two decades had not returned as nostalgia. I was not skating because I wanted to recreate an earlier life. I was enjoying what was happening now: the awkwardness, the remembered movements, the physical effort and the brief stretches of coasting.
Perhaps some parts of us do not disappear when we stop using them. They become quiet. The strength around them fades, the language may be forgotten, and confidence may have to be rebuilt. But when we ask again, something may answer.
Not with the same body. Not with the same ease. Not as the same person.
But enough to begin.
I still need to remember how to stop properly. My muscles still have work to do, and the marble floor remains a terrible place to practise.
But after more than twenty-five years, the wheels moved beneath me again.
The street was shorter than I wanted.
The breeze felt the same.