(no subject)
The last two miles of the hike back up the Grand Canyon were the worst hour and a half of my life. I didn't want to die; I wished that I had never been born so I wouldn't have had to think about wanting to die. That decision, I had thought, was reserved for prisoners of war.
I felt the heated anger of my adolescent self as my girlfriend and her almost-brother told me we were almost there. "We are almost there." And "You're doing such a great job."
It's something you hear when you are younger, when all tasks are new by virtue of your own relatively unfamiliarity with the world. Then, its either encouraging or its coming from someone you hate, and so, its annoying (but still allowable you think). Now, when you've just graduated, and the world is no longer new (its mashed potatoes), the encouragement sounds like a mocking barb; you will never not be unfamiliar with your surroundings. Familiarity is a compromise with yourself about something outside of yourself.
We, three, were the first of the eight to emerge from the canyon, and I, mouth shut with tears, could no longer think with at-the-bottom-of-the-canyon-brain--the one that had just conquered the descent (and invisibly destroyed my knees). They asked me how I felt: "how does it feel?" "We are out!" "See! it WAS only a little bit more." We walked apart, they, two, talked; I waded through the mountain air, dragging my feet through the dust and dirt.
At the bottom her father had fed me advil, four at a time, for the two days leading up to the ascent. I rested, ready for the walk to the top, waiting to get out. I took a mouthful before we left on Sunday morning--what would be a six hour hike--and put four in my pocket for the halfway mark. I popped them in on a flat stretch after the red wall, before the kaibab, one by one. No one saw. The first two went down with sips from the camelbak and the third with salival residue. Before the last, I looked up to the rim of the canyon, a part of the top where you can't get out. You can never see where it is you are to spit yourself out of it.
I looked up and saw a sky so incessantly blue that my pain, red-white with clenched bone and muscle, froze and shot up into my calves and thighs; or I mis-stepped. The small, tedius descents between periods of redirection are like the barbed wire at the top of the chainlink fences at juvenile hall; reminders that the closer you are to the outside, the nearer you are to the end. My feet hiccupped and the frozen pain burst up into my ass and lowerback, my stomach, chest, and spine: my hands splayed with injured instinct.
My advil, like a piece of deep granite, sank through my fingers, to the bottom of the side canyon. I tried not to look, to avert attention from the trace of my passing, but I could hear it tinkling towards a lower level until it came to rest in our side canyon. Looking down, the candy-coated painkiller appeared a missplaced shard of Vishnu Schist sparkling in the midday sun.
I felt the heated anger of my adolescent self as my girlfriend and her almost-brother told me we were almost there. "We are almost there." And "You're doing such a great job."
It's something you hear when you are younger, when all tasks are new by virtue of your own relatively unfamiliarity with the world. Then, its either encouraging or its coming from someone you hate, and so, its annoying (but still allowable you think). Now, when you've just graduated, and the world is no longer new (its mashed potatoes), the encouragement sounds like a mocking barb; you will never not be unfamiliar with your surroundings. Familiarity is a compromise with yourself about something outside of yourself.
We, three, were the first of the eight to emerge from the canyon, and I, mouth shut with tears, could no longer think with at-the-bottom-of-the-canyon-brain--the one that had just conquered the descent (and invisibly destroyed my knees). They asked me how I felt: "how does it feel?" "We are out!" "See! it WAS only a little bit more." We walked apart, they, two, talked; I waded through the mountain air, dragging my feet through the dust and dirt.
At the bottom her father had fed me advil, four at a time, for the two days leading up to the ascent. I rested, ready for the walk to the top, waiting to get out. I took a mouthful before we left on Sunday morning--what would be a six hour hike--and put four in my pocket for the halfway mark. I popped them in on a flat stretch after the red wall, before the kaibab, one by one. No one saw. The first two went down with sips from the camelbak and the third with salival residue. Before the last, I looked up to the rim of the canyon, a part of the top where you can't get out. You can never see where it is you are to spit yourself out of it.
I looked up and saw a sky so incessantly blue that my pain, red-white with clenched bone and muscle, froze and shot up into my calves and thighs; or I mis-stepped. The small, tedius descents between periods of redirection are like the barbed wire at the top of the chainlink fences at juvenile hall; reminders that the closer you are to the outside, the nearer you are to the end. My feet hiccupped and the frozen pain burst up into my ass and lowerback, my stomach, chest, and spine: my hands splayed with injured instinct.
My advil, like a piece of deep granite, sank through my fingers, to the bottom of the side canyon. I tried not to look, to avert attention from the trace of my passing, but I could hear it tinkling towards a lower level until it came to rest in our side canyon. Looking down, the candy-coated painkiller appeared a missplaced shard of Vishnu Schist sparkling in the midday sun.