The Second Tuesday

November fifth.

The shoes were the same ones. Two sizes too wide, velcro closure, the kind of rubber-soled grip that makes you feel like you are probably doing something right even when you aren't. I noticed them the second time the way you notice a specific chair in a waiting room, not because anything is remarkable about it, but because you have sat in it before and your body already knows where to put itself. That's not nothing. That's actually the whole thing, I think.

I didn't deliberate about going back. That's the part I keep turning over. The first session I registered for on a Tuesday evening in September with my card details and a quiet kind of controlled dread, and then I spent two weeks anticipating it at low volume. The second session I just, went. Wrote it in the calendar, took the bus, showed up. The borrowed shoes were waiting in the same cubby rack. I buckled the harness the way the instructor had shown us and it fit the same way it had the first time: unfamiliar, and then immediately not.

The shoe conversation. Second Tuesday.

There is something specific about wanting something you have never tried. I don't mean the wanting that is actually just curiosity, the kind you can satisfy with a YouTube video and then put down. I mean the wanting that is physical, that lives somewhere between your sternum and your shoulders and that doesn't resolve when you think about the thing, it only resolves when you do the thing. The wall is harder than any photograph of a wall suggests. It is also stranger, and more precise, and it requires a kind of attention that crowds out everything else for exactly the duration of the climb. That is, I suspect, the point.

Six or seven feet up. Not thinking about it.

I came back because I wanted to. Not because I had told anyone I would, not because I had written it somewhere committal, not because the arc of the thing demanded a second chapter. Just because the first Tuesday left something open and I wanted to close it, except closing it turned out to mean: doing it again, and again finding it open. The shoes fit badly. I came back anyway. That's the whole story.