What Two Weeks Off Costs You

January eleventh. The Tuesday sessions resumed this week, which I knew they would, and which I had been quietly dreading in a way I kept not-naming until I was standing at the base of the wall with my shoes laced and my forearms already registering some kind of pre-emptive complaint. Two weeks off over the holidays isn't nothing. The body is honest about these things in a way that doesn't flatter you.

Simone showed up looking approximately fine, which I note without bitterness. She has the particular quality of a person who maintains herself across disruptions in a way I have never quite managed, and she said nothing about it, which is, in its own way, the most generous thing you can do for someone who is already aware. We went through the session. I came off the wall twice in places I cleared in November without thinking. The third time I held it. The forearms had something to say about that for the rest of the evening.

Reading the problem, pre-regret

The thing about returning to something after a gap is that you spend the first half of the session feeling like a stranger and the second half remembering that you are not, quite. The route is the same. The holds are where they were. The problem is just that you forgot you already know this, and the wall doesn't let you pretend otherwise for very long. I wrote about this once before, the year I came back to open studio after a holiday break and felt like I was walking into a room that had rearranged itself. The strangeness was in the returner, I said then. Still true.

The hands know before the rest of you does

Walked to the bus stop after, chalk still on my hands because I forgot to wipe them properly, and Simone said something about the camera, whether I'd been carrying it. I said no, I'd left it home. She nodded like that was an answer to a question she hadn't asked yet. The year-end post had named the pattern: three times carried, not used. January is early. No decisions to report.