I Can Jump Again
"Let's try that jump one more time."
"Okay."
Before I knew it, a full month had passed since I'd started learning figure skating from Yerim.
The problem was—
I can't even land a single toe loop...?
There are six kinds of jumps in figure skating, each scored differently by difficulty. The easiest of them is the toe loop. The hardest is the Axel.
And I was a skater who had landed a quadruple Axel — a jump so difficult it was considered nearly impossible, even among Axels.
"Hmm... what's going on? Your skating and turns are solid. Am I teaching something wrong?"
I had spent more than two weeks failing to land the single toe loop — the most basic jump in the sport. Yerim kept looking at me like she couldn't make sense of it. Of course she couldn't. I'd picked up skating speed and every other technique almost immediately, and yet jumps alone refused to stick.
Not that staring at the problem helped me either.
What's wrong with me?
Back then, every dawn had begun on the ice. Before the fatigue ever settled in, what my body knew first was jumping. It was a sensation earned by falling thousands of times — something I thought had been carved into my bones.
Now that same sensation felt foreign.
It wasn't that changing bodies had killed my figure-skating instincts or talent. If anything, this body's durability — its toughness — felt better than before. And a single jump barely needed rotational power, so it wasn't the five-year-old frame either.
And yet the moment I tried to jump—
"Ah—!"
Thud. Straight down onto the ice.
If it had just been a landing problem, I could have fixed it. But the second I left the ground, my body stopped listening. It was enough to drive me insane.
"Seolhwa, just checking — you're not scared of falling, are you?"
"No."
"You keep jumping even after you fall, so that's not it. And you've got plenty of rotation..."
Listening to Yerim, a thought clicked into place.
Rotation.
I was learning all over again from Yerim, a female skater — learning jumps built on rotational power instead of the raw force I'd always relied on. But human instinct doesn't rewrite decades of muscle memory overnight.
In that case—
"I'll try again."
A toe loop, for a right-footed skater, is a jump launched off the tip of the left toe pick. What mattered right now wasn't hang time from a powerful takeoff, and it wasn't centrifugal force spinning the body faster.
It was just a simple one-rotation jump. I carved that fact into my mind one more time.
Tap. I drove the tip of my left foot into the ice and lifted off.
The rebound of the takeoff felt lighter than anything I remembered from my past life. Which meant I could rise more easily. I let the power go and floated up.
The impact of the landing hit at the same instant — but there was no wobble. Rotation, landing, stop. All of it flowed as a single motion.
I did it.
That faint, unmistakable sensation of a successful jump. For the brief moment I hung in the air, every sound in the world disappeared. It was a little different from my past life's feeling — but not in a bad way.
Letting the force go. Setting the weight down. Rising lightly instead.
I was finally starting to understand that this body had a way of its own.
It had only been a simple basic jump lasting barely a second.
"Wow! So you get how to do it now? A month and you're already jumping — you're a genius. A genius!"
Yerim rushed over and pulled me into a hug, beaming. Off to the side, Mom had been watching my attempts the whole time, and her eyes were shining with tears.
"But how did you do it?"
Once the rush of success had settled, Yerim looked at me and asked.
"I put more power into my legs."
"Power?"
The reason I'd been failing until just now was simple. Yerim's instructions had been about jumping with as little force as possible. My body, still wired to my past life's instincts, kept trying to jump with power — and the two clashed into pure cognitive dissonance.
The method I'd succeeded with dozens of times had become the obstacle. My body had simply been misreading my commands.
...Different, but the same.
I'd chosen figure skating again believing I could never jump the way I used to. But this body was different. I was still too young to measure it precisely, yet even I could tell these weren't ordinary physical gifts.
With this—
...I can jump.
Hope rose in my chest — the hope that I really could skate the way I once had.
"Alright, this is called a plank position, so—"
After the on-ice lesson ended, we moved to the training room. Yerim stopped mid-sentence.
Before she'd even finished speaking, Seolhwa had already locked into a perfect plank. Exact elbow angles, a clean spinal line, knees unbent, core engaged with clear, deliberate tension. It was the posture of someone who had done this countless times.
"Have you learned this somewhere too?"
Figure skating techniques were one thing — but weight training on top of that? Yerim knew full well these weren't things a five-year-old picked up just anywhere. And still, she couldn't stop herself from asking every time.
"I've seen figure skaters training on TV."
Seolhwa answered without even lifting her head. Yerim accepted it. Figure skating's popularity had been climbing lately, and with this child's talent, reproducing a movement after seeing it once wasn't strange at all.
"Then take a short break, and we'll go for fifteen seconds this time."
"Okay."
Honestly, performing a movement without difficulty was something most kids called geniuses or prodigies could manage by five. What was harder — what truly stood out — was the way Seolhwa carried herself.
She doesn't show any strain.
No matter what task Yerim gave her, she carried it out in silence, without a single complaint.
At five, it ought to feel hard.
Yerim had attended every World Championship and Olympics and had seen countless talents along the way. The reason she'd been able to beat them was simple.
Not every genius works hard.
Having talent didn't mean you used it. Sometimes it was plain laziness. Sometimes it was the fear of trusting your gift only to be betrayed by it. Given how young most skaters started, the former was overwhelmingly more common.
Seolhwa was neither.
She had talent, and she used it as if that were the most natural thing in the world. Not a word about being tired. No self-blame over mistakes. Not even a flicker of change in her expression when she was praised. She already carried herself like a real athlete.
"Seolhwa, want to try entering a competition?"
"Huh?"
Yerim was certain. This child wouldn't be swallowed by the pressure of a real competition. She would absorb even that into her own sense of the ice.
"A competition?"
"Yeah. You can do a single toe loop now, right? With just that, you've already got half the battle won."
That much was true. There were six jumps, but at the root it all came down to rotations. Land one, and the rest were mostly differences in takeoff method — close enough.
Even so, wasn't a competition a little soon?
Come to think of it, girls could enter as Novice with just a single toe loop, couldn't they?
Korea's figure skating rank system started at Beginner/Novice and ran from Level 1 through Level 8. The lowest tier — Novice — was something you could enter with nothing more than the single toe loop I'd finally landed.
Still.
A competition, huh...
In my past life, every competition had been a proving ground, and every one of them had weighed on me. Being scored. Being judged. Standing in front of an audience with the feeling that one mistake would bring everything down.
That was why, at some point, I'd only cared about the World Championships and the Olympics. Anything less, and I might have fallen apart.
Would it be different now?
I thought about it. Right now, I wasn't Cha Yunsung — the men's singles skater who'd started at twelve and thrown quad jumps. I was just an ordinary... well, no — a rather strikingly pretty and adorable five-year-old named Cha Seolhwa.
If it's now.
No one knew me yet. If I fell on a jump, if I blanked on the choreography and froze mid-program, people would just smile and call it cute.
This might be a chance.
A stretch of time when mistakes on the ice were still allowed. A stage where a single expression, a single gesture, could draw applause.
This was the moment that asked whether Cha Seolhwa could fall in love with figure skating again... no.
Whether she could go mad for it again.
"Yes. I want to go."
"Then what rank should we aim for... Since it's your first time, Novice would be best, right?"
Yerim asked it in a carefully casual tone. If I'd really been nothing more than a clueless five-year-old Cha Seolhwa, I would have answered Novice without a second thought.
"I want to do Level 1."
"Really? Didn't I just explain how the ranks work? To enter at Level 1, you have to master all the single jumps."
"I can do it."
"Seolhwa, you're not saying that because you feel pressured, are you?"
"No. I just... want to challenge myself."
Truthfully, Level 1 was a little too modest to call a real challenge for me. But I didn't trail off. I said it clearly, word by word.
That seemed to please her. Yerim studied me for a moment, then the corner of her mouth lifted.
"Alright. Unnie will take full responsibility and help you prepare. From now until the competition, it's jump practice every day."
"Got it."
"You know there's no running away now, right? If you start crying halfway through and try to bolt, unnie's coming after you."
From my past life, I knew she meant every word. It didn't matter. I had no intention of throwing away this second chance on something as cheap as escape.
I'm not aiming for a perfect first competition anyway.
It was fine if things were still unfinished. Some things could only be completed by stepping onto the competition ice.
My feelings, starting over on the ice. My technique, too.
I had a feeling this life was going to be different from the last.