Four Minutes and Then You're Registered

April twenty-fifth. The brochure sat on my kitchen counter for three weeks. I kept moving it, to the edge of the counter when I needed the space, back to the middle when I felt guilty, but I never threw it away, which I now understand was the tell. You don't keep something you're not going to do.

On Thursday I signed up. The actual registration took four minutes, maybe less. I handed over my card, they gave me a receipt, and that was it. I stood outside on the sidewalk afterward in the mild April air and thought: okay. That's done. The gap between circling something and doing something is apparently just the willingness to walk up to a counter and say the words out loud.

I showed up tonight twenty minutes early because that's what I do, I showed up twenty minutes early to the letterpress workshop too, I showed up twenty minutes early to my first pottery class, and I stood in the empty room for a while before anyone else arrived. There's something about the room-before-it-starts that I keep noticing. The chairs still pushed in. The materials stacked in a particular order at the ends of the tables. The windows catching the last of the afternoon light. Everything is still potential. Nobody has made a mistake yet.

first one in the room, as is tradition apparently

I don't know yet whether I'm going to be any good at this. I don't know whether that's even the right question. What I know is that the brochure isn't on my counter anymore, and I spent an hour tonight doing something I'd never done before, and I drove home with my hands smelling faintly like something unfamiliar, and Gerald was exactly where I left him on the windowsill, looking improbably healthy as always. I'll tell you more when I know more.

the part where I still look like I know what I'm doing