*

Anna and I, together in a studio with floor to ceiling glass in the canopy of a conifer forest. Rain falls. Crows work on a nest in one of the Douglas fir trees. The class isn’t yoga, but I wish it were. I didn’t know how much I’ve missed moving my body in synchrony with others, breathing in and out together, eyes closed.

*

At the bouldering gym, I stand nervously at the edge of the mats, arms crossed against my chest. I watch a young lanky man attempt a problem that I was eyeing up. He falls off at a point that I determine to be the crux. He saunters off the mat to his friends who are perched in a row on a bench with a view of the wall.

I step on the mat, arms still crossed against my chest. I know they are watching me. Everyone watches each other, looking for the key to solve the problem. I grip the first two holds and begin. The world - the spectators - fall away. The drone and murmur of the background noise of the gym.

I am nervous about bouldering; I am used to the security of a rope.

I reach the crux. It’s an overhead traverse across an open space. I reach out and grip the holds. I realize that I need to switch hands. I flag a foot and carefully swap hands. Then before the panic hits, I move my body through air to the other side, and then I feel my body completing the remainder of the climb. I am not aware of what I am doing - my body knows what to do, how to reach that hold and how to turn a knee down to put my body in the correct position. I mantle over the top. I am finished.

“You’re so lucky to be strong,” Anna remarks.

She’s right. I am lucky to be strong.

*

Board game nights. Running with Brent alongside the ocean. Cycling in the rain. All of these everyday things that I’m not recording. They all happened. Claudia serving plates of steaming pasta. Playing pool with an eighty year old man, the father of one of my friends, in this house on an island, and I think that he is flirting with me because he’s starved for interaction. The skiing. Did I write about the hut trips? There were two of them. And then, slipping into the ocean without a wetsuit, again. Laughing at the pain of the frigid water pressing around me. Skiing with my dad to discover that he knows dozens of people on the mountain, all of the regulars, and there’s more chit chat than skiing. Going skiing with a group of women, all strangers, and watching the sunset from the mountain peak with my new friends, and then skiing down recklessly fast in the dark by the light of a headlamp.

*

Walking into the living room, nonchalantly, wearing lingerie. His little gasp of Oh! and then dropping everything and coming to carefully touch me.

*