Two Hours and a Collapsed Bowl

December third. I want to tell you that I had a plan. I did not have a plan.

Three Tuesdays ago I walked past the community center board on my way out of the climbing gym and there was a sign for an open pottery studio session, beginner welcome, six-thirty to eight-thirty, pay at the door. I had my jacket on. I had my bag. I stood there reading it for maybe forty-five seconds and then I turned around, went back to the desk, and paid the eight dollars before I could think of a reason not to.

I have sat at a pottery wheel exactly once before, which was a class I took two winters ago that I loved and then quietly let lapse the way you let a gym membership lapse, not from boredom but from some vague administrative cowardice. Walking back into that room alone, no class structure, no Simone beside me, no instructor calling the sequence, was a different thing entirely. The clay does not care that you used to know how to do this. It has its own opinion about what shape it wants to be, and on Tuesday evening its opinion was: not a bowl. Not anything, really. Mostly a slow-motion collapse.

Rinsing off two hours of optimism.

I stayed the full two hours. I rinsed my hands at the little plastic basin at the end, and I had clay under my fingernails until Thursday, and on the bus home I kept turning my hands over in my lap like I was looking for evidence that it had actually happened.

Centering the clay. The clay had other plans.

I don't know what I made. I know I'm going back.