The Part Where I Registered and Then Immediately Panicked About Something Else

September twenty-second. The card details went in at nine-seventeen p.m. on a Tuesday. I know this because my laptop was also open to forty-three pages of notes I was supposed to have reviewed by morning, and the timestamp on the confirmation email has since become a small piece of evidence in a case I am building against myself.

Here is what happened. I had found the clinic flyer two weeks ago, photographed it on my phone at the community center corkboard, showed it to Simone on her way in, and then did what I always do: thought about it at low volume for the better part of a fortnight while the tab sat open in the background of every other thing I was doing. The thinking was not dramatic. It was more like the way you let a window sit open in a room and eventually you stop noticing the sound it makes. And then Tuesday evening I sat down to go through the notes, the tab was still open, and I just, typed in the numbers. Done. The confirmation arrived. The cursor blinked back at me.

deep in it

I will say this about that particular kind of evening: the mug helps less than you think it will, but you keep returning to it anyway. Four chapters. A confirmation email for a beginner rock-climbing clinic at an indoor gym two neighborhoods over, starting on a Tuesday in October. My handwriting in the notebook margins gets progressively less legible as the hours go on, which I have decided is not a character flaw but a data point. I wrote 'Tuesday evenings' at the top of a sticky note and put it next to the windowsill, beside the bowl, beside the card, beside the two photographs, which is apparently where I put things I am not ready to explain yet.

mug. stare. repeat.

The notes got done. Not elegantly, but done. The clinic is registered. I have not thought too carefully about what either of those things means, which is probably the correct approach for a Tuesday night at eleven-something when the kitchen light is the only thing still on.