Mount Taiowa
I turn back into the wind and I can see the edge of the world. It's a stark line against the dark blue of the sky. There are some trails of smoke rising from the top of the plateau.
Are they thinking about me?
They loaded up my mule with water and jerky and sent me down the narrow trail on the side of the canyon. Down into the canyon, and across its oven-fired floor. It was like walking across a pile of broken bricks. Everything was hard, sharp, hot and harsh.
A day later I had found a side canyon with a rise shallow enough for Mule and I to ascend. We squeezed around a great, red boulder and onto the plain that stretches away from the other side of the desolate canyon that marks the edge of the world.
And I traveled for days, outside the world, across a plain that held nothing but distance. Tethered to Mule, I was petrified that he might wander off. Alone, I would have been able to do nothing but die of dehydration, scalded by the sun, in that vast, shadeless expanse.
But I had persevered, and made it to this mountain. Climbed the mountain and here I stand, looking back at the edge of the world. The wind blows up from the hot desert that stretches between me and everyone else. Everything else.
Why am I here? Because they sent me. Why did they sent me?
Because they could see it. Because when the sky was clear and the sun was setting, it lit up this mountain like a beacon. A red peak on the distant horizon, they had sat and stared at it. They had peered at this distant place and wondered what it was. What it held. What it must be like.
They had populated this visual speck of a mountain with their hopes and their dreams, and now they had sent me to bring them back.
If I die, will they know?
If I never come back, they'll assume I'm dead. But that reality would come gradually. They would come to accept my death the way they accept the onset of winter. It wouldn't be the thunder-crash, raging storm that is someone falling off the edge of the world and dying. My death would be a thought, a sigh, not an event and a wail.
It would be like that to them. I look around. I could fall there, and break my leg, and die. I could eat some berries from that bramble wrapped around that tree over there, and be poisoned and die. Mule here could get spooked by a rattlesnake and run off. And so I would die.
There's so many ways to die, and just one way that's not.
I can't see my footprints in the desert that led me here, but my memory paints them onto the desert. They are a thin line, a very long, thin line coming out from the canyon and across the vast emptiness and up to this point. A solitary line.
There is no one else. There is the entire universe. And there is me. I think I remember there being other people. I remember faces, and voices, and being touched.
But all I know for sure is the hot, dry wind that makes my skin stretch, makes my face feel tight like the skin of a drum. I can see the edge of the world, but it is small and far away.
This mountain is full of hopes and dreams. But what can I use to gather them? How can I carry them back with me? And who will I give them to?
How can I stand here and stare back at the world? I must not be part of the world anymore, to be able to see it, see all of it, stretched across the horizon. I am separate from the world. I am separate from the people in the world. I am separate, and alone.
I am dead.
Are they thinking about me?
They loaded up my mule with water and jerky and sent me down the narrow trail on the side of the canyon. Down into the canyon, and across its oven-fired floor. It was like walking across a pile of broken bricks. Everything was hard, sharp, hot and harsh.
A day later I had found a side canyon with a rise shallow enough for Mule and I to ascend. We squeezed around a great, red boulder and onto the plain that stretches away from the other side of the desolate canyon that marks the edge of the world.
And I traveled for days, outside the world, across a plain that held nothing but distance. Tethered to Mule, I was petrified that he might wander off. Alone, I would have been able to do nothing but die of dehydration, scalded by the sun, in that vast, shadeless expanse.
But I had persevered, and made it to this mountain. Climbed the mountain and here I stand, looking back at the edge of the world. The wind blows up from the hot desert that stretches between me and everyone else. Everything else.
Why am I here? Because they sent me. Why did they sent me?
Because they could see it. Because when the sky was clear and the sun was setting, it lit up this mountain like a beacon. A red peak on the distant horizon, they had sat and stared at it. They had peered at this distant place and wondered what it was. What it held. What it must be like.
They had populated this visual speck of a mountain with their hopes and their dreams, and now they had sent me to bring them back.
If I die, will they know?
If I never come back, they'll assume I'm dead. But that reality would come gradually. They would come to accept my death the way they accept the onset of winter. It wouldn't be the thunder-crash, raging storm that is someone falling off the edge of the world and dying. My death would be a thought, a sigh, not an event and a wail.
It would be like that to them. I look around. I could fall there, and break my leg, and die. I could eat some berries from that bramble wrapped around that tree over there, and be poisoned and die. Mule here could get spooked by a rattlesnake and run off. And so I would die.
There's so many ways to die, and just one way that's not.
I can't see my footprints in the desert that led me here, but my memory paints them onto the desert. They are a thin line, a very long, thin line coming out from the canyon and across the vast emptiness and up to this point. A solitary line.
There is no one else. There is the entire universe. And there is me. I think I remember there being other people. I remember faces, and voices, and being touched.
But all I know for sure is the hot, dry wind that makes my skin stretch, makes my face feel tight like the skin of a drum. I can see the edge of the world, but it is small and far away.
This mountain is full of hopes and dreams. But what can I use to gather them? How can I carry them back with me? And who will I give them to?
How can I stand here and stare back at the world? I must not be part of the world anymore, to be able to see it, see all of it, stretched across the horizon. I am separate from the world. I am separate from the people in the world. I am separate, and alone.
I am dead.