What My Arms Remember

October twenty-ninth. There is chalk under my fingernails that I will not fully excavate until tomorrow, and I am fine with that.

Three years ago I walked into the gym two neighborhoods over with borrowed shoes and no real plan, and now Tuesday evenings have a specific texture that I would notice immediately if they were gone. I wrote about the first session. I wrote about buying my own shoes. I wrote, at some point, about the outdoor rock and the frozen ground and what it felt like to have nothing hold you but the surface itself. And then the sessions became furniture, present, unremarked, doing the quiet work that furniture does.

Tonight something shifted on the low wall. Not dramatically. I didn't top out anything new or solve a problem I've been stuck on. It was smaller than that, a weight distribution, a moment where my body knew where to go before I had consciously decided, and I noticed the gap between those two things and thought: that is what three years of showing up actually is. Not the moves I can do. The gap closing.

Mid-move, low wall, full attention

I sat on the mat after and looked at my hands for a while. Chalk on both palms. The same low bouldering problem on the wall behind me that I've reset my feet on probably a hundred times. The gym had thinned out, the way it does on a Sunday, I keep saying Tuesday but tonight was a Sunday, which means I went twice this week without planning to, which feels like its own kind of information.

Between attempts. The mat deserves more credit.

The walk home was cold. October is doing what October does. I had the cross necklace against my collarbone the whole session, tucked under the collar, and I could feel it when I breathed deep at the top of a reach, a small specific weight I don't notice most of the time. Noticed it tonight. I don't know what that means or if it means anything. But the arms feel like mine, and that is enough for a Sunday in late October.