The Part After the Climbing

July twenty-second.

Simone's wrist was bothering her, not badly, just enough that we both agreed without really discussing it that we weren't going to push through. We wrapped the session maybe forty minutes early, changed shoes, and then instead of actually leaving we ended up at the picnic table outside. There's a concrete pad around the side of the building with a couple of old wooden tables and a chain-link fence that faces the street, and in July, around seven o'clock, the light comes in at this very specific horizontal angle that makes everything look like it's been left out in the best possible way.

I don't remember exactly what we talked about. That sounds like a complaint but it isn't. Some conversations are like that, you're in them fully and then afterward all you can reconstruct is the general shape of the hour, the way the table felt warm from the day, the fact that you didn't look at your phone. I know Simone asked me something at some point and I didn't have a good answer. I remember sitting with my chin on my fist looking at the street, which apparently is a whole expression.

Simone laughing about something neither of us can probably name now.

She didn't push. That's a thing about Simone, she asks and then she lets the question sit there without needing you to do anything with it immediately. I've been cooking long enough to know that's actually a skill.

We stayed until the light was gone. I took a few frames of nothing in particular, the table, the shadow, the side of her face mid-laugh about something I've already forgotten, because the light was doing that thing and I've learned to at least try when that happens.

The face I make when I don't have the answer yet. Apparently it photographs.

The post I thought I was going to write this week is still in my drafts. Maybe it'll be next week's problem. Sometimes the thing you're actually trying to figure out shows up in a completely different post, wearing different clothes, pretending to be about Tuesday evening light and an abbreviated climbing session. I think that's fine. I think that's probably how it works.