After the Clay

May twenty-fourth. The walk home from pottery takes about twelve minutes if I go the regular way, and I almost never go the regular way anymore.

Wednesday evenings have developed a specific texture. The class itself is an hour and a half, most of which I spend trying to keep a wall from folding in on itself, and then there's this stretch afterward where everything slows down and I'm not quite sure what to do with my hands. They're clean by the time I get outside but they feel different. Lighter, maybe. Or just tired in a specific way that isn't bad. Simone says she can always tell when someone's been on the wheel because of how they hold their arms on the walk out. I didn't ask her what mine looks like.

leaning on the wall, not ready to leave yet

I got a bowl this week. A real one, mostly. It leans slightly to the left and the lip isn't even all the way around, but it held its shape through the whole trimming stage and the instructor said 'good' in a way that sounded like she meant it. Simone's collapsed again, the third time, and she photographed it before it went back into reclaim, which I think is exactly the right thing to do with something you made and lost. I keep thinking about that. The collapsed bowl on my windowsill has been there long enough that I forget it's a failure. It's just a thing I made that turned into a different shape than I planned.

end-of-class debrief (unofficial)

I've been meaning to reply to something. I wrote back to Carol in early May, said yes to the photograph, shorter than I meant to. I don't know what I expected after that, some immediate feeling of having handled something. It doesn't really work that way. The handling and the feeling are on different schedules. Anyway. Twelve minutes home. Fourteen if I take the longer block, which I did. The light was doing that thing where it catches the edge of every surface and makes everything look like it's been placed there on purpose.