What the Margin Said

April fifth.

The workshop flyer has been sitting folded on the counter for about two weeks. I brought it home from the gear shop the same way I bring most things home, without fully admitting to myself that I was going to do anything with it. A Saturday beginner outdoor skills clinic. Six hours. The kind of thing I would have photographed on the corkboard a year ago and let myself want quietly from a distance.

Last night I opened the notebook to the page with the number. The updated one, supervisor rate, not the 2011 estimate. I wrote the workshop cost underneath it. Then I looked at both numbers for a while.

It clears. That's the part I should probably just say plainly: it clears. The number is fine. But the margin is small enough that I noticed it, not alarmed-noticed, just aware-noticed, the way you notice a step in the dark that you weren't expecting. There's a version of this where I say the number made the decision easy. What actually happened is that the number made the decision available, and then I sat there a while longer anyway, looking at the flyer and the notebook the way two pieces of paper can't actually look at each other.

the two pieces of paper having their conversation

I think what I was doing was checking whether the want was real or just a reflex. The lag-post from March is still sitting in the back of my head, the three days between Simone's question and writing about it. I did not need three days this time. I needed about forty minutes and a cup of tea, and then I already knew. The margin said: this is the actual question. The answer said: yes. I haven't registered yet. But I will, probably tomorrow. I just wanted to write the margin down first, because it felt like the more honest thing to document.

standing next to the answer I hadn't made yet