We Climb

There’s a point where you realize you’re not alright. Up until then, you kind of ignore the signs. It begins with a tiredness, something past bone-deep. You used to literally climb mountains, attack trails with an enthusiasm approaching ferocity, and now your own limbs seem almost too much to move. There is a bed, and it’s yours, but now it is more than where you sleep. It’s the cocoon you are wrapped inside, and unfurling yourself from it each day seems to do nothing but take you away from the dreams where you are still pushing rocks aside, searching for a higher peak barely marked by footsteps.

Maybe if you just stay in that cocoon, you’ll grow wings and find the top.

You still climb, yes, but now it is the walls inside your head that need attacking, and there are no handholds or little signs of those who have come and gone before you. It is only you, and you did not bring enough water, didn’t realize how long it would take or how misty the sky would become, hovering above your head with the promise of a storm never mentioned in the forecast.

There’s an ache in your chest now, a hollow opening that somehow doesn’t stop the thrumming of heart beneath ribs, though sometimes you feel a stuttering. A hesitation. Sometimes, you revel in that stutter. Sometimes that mist rolls overhead, and you hope it swallows you alive.

You still do not have wings.

The bones inside your skin match the ones in the person beside you. Sometimes you forget that person is there, but then your shoulders might brush and your heart might do its lovely, frightening little stutter, and you remember. There are shapes in that mist now, floating wisps of a word, shy remnants of a smile, the shadow of a structure built thousands of years ago by someone who shared your bones, too. You’d like to see it clearly, maybe in the fall.

There’s a humming in your head that sounds like a song you knew growing up, something that speaks of a bay or a bog or a frog that sits on a log. There’s a hand in yours, and it holds tight, and you remember.

There will always be new mountains, and you do not have to climb them alone.

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