The Part Where You Ask a Stranger How to Unclip

January seventh. That is when I clipped into a spin bike for the first time and had to immediately ask the person next to me, a woman I had never met, who had clearly done this many times, how to unclip. She showed me without making it a thing. I appreciated that more than I said.

I had been looking at the community center's winter schedule since before Christmas. There is a specific category of class I always walk past in the brochure: the ones that require equipment I don't own and a baseline of coordination I am not certain I have. Indoor cycling has been in that column for years. I registered for a Tuesday session in early January in the same way I registered for the letterpress workshop and the first rock-climbing clinic, browser tab open, cost cleared the paper number, four-minute decision. What I did not factor in was the shoes. The borrowed shoes with the clips. The clips that do not feel intuitive and then, after twenty minutes, feel like the only way you'd want to ride.

mid-effort, somewhere in the first ten minutes

The class itself was forty-five minutes. The instructor had the kind of voice that makes you believe the hill is temporary. I was not graceful. I was not keeping up. At one point I was pedaling at a resistance level that was probably meant for a warm-up and I was already sweating through it. None of that is the part I want to write about. The part I want to write about is afterward, sitting on the hallway bench with the borrowed shoes still on because I had not yet worked out the unclipping sequence on my own, and feeling, without drama, without announcement, that I was going to come back. Not because I was good at it. Because I was very specifically not good at it yet, which is a different thing entirely.

after. the shoes were the last thing to come off.

The sketchbook is on the kitchen table. Gerald's vine has reached a new inch on the shelf. The windowsill is the same five objects plus the named gap. Everything is where it was before I tried something that made me feel immediately, genuinely, usefully bad. That is the condition of a Wednesday in January when you go somewhere new and come home to the same apartment, and the apartment is better for it somehow.