What the Shoes Had to Do with It

October twenty-fifth. The shoes were two sizes too wide. I know this because I stood at the rental counter for longer than was probably necessary, telling myself it was fine, and then spent the first twenty minutes of the session feeling them shift independently of my feet every time I stepped onto a hold. This is not a complaint about the shoes. The shoes were fine. I'm telling you about the shoes because they are the thing I remember most clearly about the first session, and when I drove back to the gym on Tuesday for the second one, I was still thinking about them, which tells you something about the quality of information I was working with when I apparently decided to go back.

I didn't deliberate about the second session. That's the part I keep returning to when I try to write this post, because I usually deliberate. I wrote down the flyer on my phone. I looked up the gym. I entered my card details at nine-seventeen on a Tuesday and then closed the laptop and felt something that was approximately dread mixed with relief. That's the pattern. And then the second session just, happened. I drove over. I signed in. I picked up the same terrible shoes and I went and stood in front of the wall, and I didn't once think, in the car or in the parking lot or at the rental counter, about whether I should.

The shoes and I had a lot to work out.

The wall is genuinely hard. I don't mean difficult-but-rewarding hard. I mean my forearms were done by the halfway point and I finished the session anyway, and when I got to the car I sat there for a moment with my hands in my lap thinking about nothing in particular, which is actually what it feels like to have done a physical thing that asked everything you had. I think I wanted that. I think that's what I had been circling around when I took the photo of the flyer and sent it to Simone and looked up the location on my phone. Not climbing specifically. Not the wall. Just the thing where you want something you haven't tried before and you go try it, and your body is involved, and it is harder than you pictured, and you come back anyway.

Reading the wall before the wall reads you.

The shoes are the detail I'll remember. The weight of the harness across my hips. The chalk on my fingertips that didn't fully come off until Thursday. Those are the parts that make it real, not the arc of it, not whatever it means, just the borrowed shoes and the chalk and the drive home with my hands in my lap and the quiet feeling of having wanted something and then gone and done it.