I do not wish for a powerful voice,
only to speak, and for that voice to have something worth saying.
Something to share, something to mend what has been broken in two;
not to divide you,
just to distract you for a moment.
Not to unsettle you, just to shake you,
nor to comfort you,
but with a single sound,
to send you soaring into the sky.
I long to speak to you.
You will be my mirror,
and every word I send your way
will somehow find its way back to me.
Perhaps I speak to you
only to hear myself.
I share my voice,
I reveal my pain,
because if I keep it only to myself,
perhaps, in the end,
I will never truly hear anyone else.
I will speak.
Will you listen?
And if you listen,
will you judge me?
And if you don’t judge me,
will you compare me?
And if you compare me,
will you leave me?
And if you leave me,
I will be just fine.
If life is a poem,
I am still searching for the verse.
The rhythm, I have;
the meaning, every now and then, I find.
The words often disappear,
and halfway through,
I leave it unfinished.
If life is a song,
my notes escape me.
The words somehow try to make sense of me,
yet they too become lost
in the chaos of my mind
the moment they try to enter it.
How can they express me?
Can they embrace me?
Perhaps they can only divide me,
or, at best, make me reflect.
And tomorrow,
they will forget me all over again.
You search for the right song,
for the words you were never able to say,
and for the memories of your past.
Yet the rhythm of your heart
will always bring you back
to the moments that, in their peak intensity,
made you feel the most alive.
A strange way for a tennis player to begin a website, isn’t it? Not with trophies, rankings, or victories, but with a poem. Well, I hope you liked it. To be honest, sometimes I struggle to understand it myself. Yet every time I read it, it seems to make a little more sense.
When I was in school, I used to write solid essays. They were not always perfectly graded, but somehow they managed to catch the attention of my teachers, who would often compliment me here and there. Back then, however, I never imagined that one day I would be writing poetry; in both Greek and English. In fact, when I first arrived in the United States for college, I could barely speak English. Yet, here we are.
How it started:
I was twenty years old, a junior at Mississippi State University, where I was a student-athlete. One random afternoon, after a long day filled with classes, tennis practice, workouts, and meetings, I found myself sitting on the couch in my apartment.
As I scrolled through my laptop, I came across a short interview featuring two Greek actors whom I admire. They were discussing a historical documentary in which they had played important roles, while scenes from the production were displaying across the screen. The moment the interview ended, I opened the notes app on my laptop and started writing.
I wrote non-stop for ten or fifteen minutes. I was completely immersed in what I was doing. I was “in the zone”, the same feeling I experience on the tennis court, the famous “flow state,” as psychologists describe the mental state athletes enter when performing at their best.
When I finished writing, I almost cried. The emotions were that intense. It felt as if I had been transported into the documentary itself, as if I had experienced every scene and every emotion firsthand. I could not explain what I was feeling in words.
For days, I kept what I had written to myself. About a week later, I called my parents and my brother and read it aloud to them. They were speechless. I remember asking them, “do you like it? what do you think?” They all agreed that they loved it.
Since then, my life has gone through phases of constant writing and expression, followed by periods of silence. Years have passed, and somehow, I am still writing.
There have been many times when I have asked myself: Why do I write? What is it that I want to say? Why do I feel the need to read my words to other people? Why do I want to share them with you, for example?
Sometimes, I can give a convincing answer. Sometimes, I cannot.
What I do know is that writing is a form of expression. It allows me to give shape to thoughts and emotions that ordinary words fail to capture. Perhaps that is why I turn to poetry. It helps me make sense of what I am experiencing in a particular moment, even when that experience feels impossible to explain.
I do not worry too much about how others interpret what I write. I separate myself from that. That is the beauty of both writing and reading: every person understands the same words differently, through the lens of their own experiences, memories, and emotions.
And that, I leave up to you.
Why do I still write?
To be honest, I still ask myself that question quite often.
Over the years, I realized that writing and tennis are not as different as people might think. They are, of course, completely different worlds, but somehow they ask the same things from you. They expose you. They make you vulnerable. They force you to look at yourself, even when you certainly don’t want to.
On the tennis court, there is nowhere to hide. Every doubt, every fear, every moment of confidence, excitiment, every insecurity eventually shows itself. Writing does exactly the same thing. The only difference is that, instead of holding a racket, I am holding a pen, or typing on my laptop.
People often ask me what tennis has taught me. Well, that is countless. But we can mention some of the obvious ones: discipline, determination, resilience, etc. Beyond all that, tennis has taught me how to observe. To observe people, emotions, relationships, victories, setbacks, and, most importantly, myself.
Maybe that is why I write.
Because some moments are simply too intense to experience once and then leave behind. Some moments stay with you. They ask to be remembered. They ask to be revisited. Sometimes they ask to be understood, and sometimes they do not.
I have written in airports, in empty apartments, in parties full of people, in busy cafes of cities I visited, in an office between meetings, after victories, after defeats, in moments when I felt on top of the world and in moments when I felt the struggle. But one thing remains: no matter how busy or quiet the place is, when I am inspired, I am fully present. I am “in the moment”.
Some of my poems make complete sense to me today. Others confuse me just as much as they did when I wrote them.
And maybe that is the beauty of it.
Maybe poetry, like life itself, is not meant to be fully understood.
Maybe it is simply meant to be felt.
To be continued:
For someone who has spent most of her life on the tennis court, I have talked surprisingly little about tennis. Interesting.
I guess introducing twenty one years of life holding a tennis racket, thousands of hours on court, and a journey that somehow brought me back to the professional tour was never going to fit into a single article anyway.
So, in the next chapter, let’s start from the beginning. See you next time!
If you would like to follow my journey on and off the court and receive future articles directly in your inbox, feel free to subscribe on my website.
Magda Adaloglou 
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