The Collar Investigation

January sixteenth.

There is a particular kind of moment that happens in a locker area before a Tuesday session. Not a big moment. The kind where someone is inspecting something very small and you're standing close enough to help but you are, in practice, entirely decorative. Simone had found something on the collar of her puffer vest, a pulled thread, maybe, or a loose seam, and was holding it between two fingers with the focused attention of someone doing very precise work. I was watching in the way you watch when you have no useful skill to offer.

I took the picture because the specificity of it seemed worth keeping. Simone mid-inspection, me mid-useless. The gear bags on the bench, her twist-out catching the warmer light near the exit, both of us still in our arriving clothes rather than our climbing ones. There's a version of a Tuesday that starts here, before the harness, before the chalk, this transitional two minutes of being two people in a locker room sorting out a collar situation.

Collar crisis: resolved (or abandoned)

I have been thinking, in the lag the way I do, about Simone's finished thing, the small knotted object tucked into the outer pocket of her bag a couple sessions back, seen before explained, which turned out to be its own kind of information. I didn't ask about the collar thread either. Some things you just watch, and it turns out watching is already the form of participation available to you. She worked it out, or gave up on it, which from the outside looks the same. We laced up and went in.

The pre-session logistics, apparently.

The Tuesday sessions are their own small calendar. I know this one happened in January because my coat is still on a hook and I'm still thinking about Gerald's new leaf from the first week of the year. January sixth and there was already something growing on the windowsill and something finished in a bag and the cord still wound around the sill in the particular way cords settle when they have found their place. The collar situation resolved itself. We climbed. The locker area went back to being a locker area.