The Wall Had Notes

January fifth. I signed up for a beginner bouldering session at the climbing gym on Tuesday and did not tell anyone because I knew exactly what would happen if I did: someone would be encouraging, and I would feel the weight of their encouragement the entire time I was failing, and failing is hard enough without an audience expecting you to succeed.

Here is what I knew going in: I have been doing yoga for almost a year, I ran for a while, I am not fragile. Here is what I did not know: climbing uses your hands in a way that nothing else has ever used my hands, and the shoes they rent you at the front desk are never quite right, and V0, which is the easiest possible rating, the rating that has a small picture of a smiley face in the gym's legend, is still a thing that requires your body to solve a spatial problem in real time while also not falling. I got three holds up. Three. Then I came back down, not because I chose to, but because my right foot simply left the wall and that was that.

Three holds up. This was as high as it got.

I sat on the bench afterward and looked at my palms. There was chalk everywhere and a kind of friction-pink that I have never seen on my own skin before. I unlaced the rented shoes. I thought about the collapsed bowl on the windowsill at home, the letterpress card beside it, all the things I've kept from attempts that didn't go the way I planned, and I thought: this one goes in that category. Not a failure. Just a thing that has more to teach me than I expected on the first day. I might go back. The wall seemed, if anything, unbothered, which I found slightly motivating.

Hands: a review.