The Part Before You Think About It

November fourth. There is a flyer I favorite walked past six times on the corkboard outside the climbing gym, I know this because I remember noticing that it had one of those tabs at the bottom you tear off, and at least three of them were already gone. Aerial silks, beginner drop-in, Wednesday evenings. The studio is two blocks east. I know where it is. I have known where it is for months.

I tore off the tab on a Tuesday. I went the next evening. I want to be precise about the timeline because the gap between those two things, one day, twenty-four hours, barely, is the part that surprises me. Usually I would have folded the tab into my jacket pocket and let it migrate through the laundry cycle until it became lint. The thinking-about-it phase is normally very long with me. The doing-it phase requires the thinking-about-it phase to have already exhausted itself, which can take weeks. This time the thinking-about-it phase was apparently: eight seconds in front of a corkboard on a Tuesday afternoon, and then a torn tab, and then the next evening.

the face of someone reconsidering nothing

I was not good at it. This needs to be said plainly. My arms are reasonably strong from two years of climbing and I still spent the first twenty minutes discovering that silk grip is its own entirely different skill set, and that being a foot off the floor feels much higher when you got there by wrapping fabric around your ankle rather than clipping into a rope. The instructor was patient. The other two people in the drop-in were further along and therefore not actively watching me figure out which direction my hips were supposed to go, which was generous of them. I drove home, I had borrowed Simone's car, which is a whole other paragraph I do not have room for, with tired shoulders and the specific satisfaction of having been genuinely bad at something new.

feet off the ground. did not immediately regret it.

I went back the following Wednesday. I am going to keep going back. I did not take a photograph while I was there, which felt right, the camera and the silk seemed like they would argue about who gets to be the point. What I have instead is the torn tab, still on my kitchen counter, and the fact of having gone. I keep thinking about the eight seconds at the corkboard. I don't know if I made a decision or just failed to make the other one. Either way I was already in the air before I'd finished thinking it through, which is maybe the only condition under which I actually move.