🎧:
[𝙲𝚊𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚜𝚎𝚜 𝚒𝚗 𝚁𝚎𝚜𝚙𝚒𝚝𝚎’𝚜 𝙰𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚜𝚒𝚜]
At this terrestrial nexus of burn ward Icarus and beleaguered Sisyphus lies…
The trail’s relentless ascent wrings clarity from my bones. Marrow creaks like the wind’s cradle.
I see the scattered silvery strands of hair above my brow sweep gently across my vision, hear the rustling of the pines, and ritualistically begin to ponder the inexorable procession of time.
I’m involuntarily reaching for middle age. A me of two decades past could’ve never conceived of the road that took me here. To places I never expected to be.
The grease gum winding of my mind’s gyre, two more severe, arced, sloping turns: false summits. Relentless, brutal, life-giving ascent. Nostrils flare like the hot leather inside of a beater Oldsmobile.
My sinews scream like mooring line tension. This isn’t sea level, nor Kansas—though I may glance either from up here.
Pine-obscured ptarmigan thunders? Spooky forest dwelling. Awfully low for such a bird. Maybe another. Something similar.
I’m nearly there, alone up here, lethal silence. By now the sky has broken against the more formidable rocks on the horizon.
As I begin to level from ascent to plateau, my mind shifts from visceral immediacy to psychological abstract.
I’m so high up now—but still not very—and isolated. It’s serene in a comfortably nerve-wracking way.
Vaseline saliva. Calves locomotive driving rods. Ravenous companions—gastric and avian.
Short respite: a tangent to see a place where a picnic is set for no one, nowhere, in the phosphorescent sunlight. My body briefly forgets the strain.
Once you’re at cruising altitude, don’t waste it. Explore. Ponder. Persist!
The steel wool chaos tangle of stone and evergreens scrubs my mental palette clear as the bluebird skies’ sweeping embrace.
From up here I can see where deserts are forged with time’s erosive persistence and epochs’ crosswinds.
My father was a soft-boiled, hard man. Funny how often he still comes up, after all these years, when he only ever excelled at tearing me down. What a complex tragedy of a man.
Remembrances are drawn, as from a well—so many memories of cheap mountain bike tires pounding scorched pavement on billowing summer streets to the edge of sanity, with blaring choruses of psycho-emotional insulation roaring in my ears.
I can smell the pine needles, dirt, and stone. I wonder how I must appear, if at all, to the perspective of the living model town on the distance below.
My mind decompresses like a tightly wound steel coil toy spiral—not a Slinky, but a pinwheel in a can, like one for a miniature film reel.
If I could bottle the aroma of the pre-summer pine mountain air and the whispers of the breeze, I could capture some fragment of transient paradise.
Dramaturgical musings from a disembodied, friendly stranger. Auditory occupations at a volume conducive to survival.
My thoughts settle like last autumn’s scant memories, scattered around me on the rocky, evergreen turf.
As the sunbeam valley opens, my mind and body clear, catharsis culminates, like the breaking of a harsh season upon unceasing time’s conveyor.
My thoughts return to him as they have now for years—never enough time in all possible realities to contain our infinite, reciprocal substance. Thoroughly examined lives wound together like so much unfadable DNA. The very foundational stuff of life. Love. Worldly attachments and human concerns reemerge as I return to the ground.
I yearn for the abstract, grandiose perceptions of youth that time and experience have so mechanically claimed. All the world was an involuntary trance of the imagination, where a turn of phrase, a thought, or a melody could so effortlessly spark universes of nascent abstraction.
I notice that the trail is now more packed and smoother than at higher elevations. Greater masses have trodden so close to the Earth; it’s beaten with a thousand journeys.
