The gym closed.
Not in a night. It was slower than that. The kind of slow that's worse. Where you can see it coming and there's nothing to do about it. Staff who showed up for a while and then didn't because they couldn't afford to anymore.
The gym let people go. Friends. People who'd been there for years, who set the problems and kept the place running and knew everybody by name. Then it was all done.
Not all at once. People just scattered and couldn't quite come back together.
We see some of them sometimes. Mostly we don't.
The building's still there. Another gym. The walls didn't come down. But it sat empty while things got sorted, and by the time it opened back up the thing that made it what it was had already been gone for a while.
That included us. The people behind this thing, behind Goodfall. Life got busy and everybody rebuilt their relationship to climbing on their own. Different gyms. Different schedules. New jobs. Sessions weren't shared anymore. You stop texting about a problem you're working when there's nobody working it with you. You figure it out alone and move on. That's not a bad thing. It just is what it is.
We had designs ready. Had them sitting. The timing wasn't right and weknew it. Not because of the gym, just because it wasn't. You can feel when something isn't there yet. We waited.
We kept climbing. Found other walls. We separated. Learned different problems on different surfaces. The work continued. It just didn't have a home for a while. No bench to come back to. No set you could check every week and watch change. Nobody to run into. Nobody to talk about this weird thing we are doing.
That time gave us something though.
Room to think about what we actually wanted to put out. We'd always cared about the designs. We wanted to care just as much about what they were printed on. Better quality shirts. Heavier fleece. Printing that does the artwork justice. Woven labels. The kind of quality that matches the intention behind the thing.
If you're going to wear it into the ground, it should be worth wearing into the ground.
The designs were ready. I guess we were just waiting on everything else.
It's ready.
