June 16th in the Franklin Mountains

It took me a few seconds to realize that I was utterly and completely lost. The trail that I had taken to get up to the mountain seemed to have vanished into the Ocotillo and cactus, blown away like the sands. Everything was the same rocky, dry earth that I had scrapped and clawed against getting up here. The jagged red rocks were painted with stripes of crimson from my bleeding palms.

This is fine, I thought to myself. I never had any intention of coming back down anyway.

I looked ahead, and the view of rolling hills and mountains, endless in shape and mass. The sun of El Paso set just beyond the dry peaks, turning the sky into an array of colors so vivid that it seemed as if a heavenly choir had descended, fiery swords at the ready, consuming the sky in hues of purple, reds, pinks, oranges, and quiet blues. The moon herself sat just off to the side of my vision, watching and pulsating, like a heartbeat of white and a silent sun. I debated calling her, knowing no one would hear me (not that it would matter if they did). But her silent gaze, and the slow darkening spreading from the bottom of the pool of colors told me that I didn’t have such time for pleasantries right now.

I’ll speak to her tonight as I say my goodbyes.

With that, I hoisted up my bag, turned back to the next obstacle in my way, another rolling peak, and began my ascent to the heavens.

The trail I followed didn’t exist. It wound nowhere and traced no outline of the mountain. Yet still, my feet took hold of some invisible staircase through the brush. I had been walking for hours before this point, so the numbness of the trek had already spread throughout my body. If I had brushed past any thorns or spines… hell, if any even stabbed into my leg itself… I didn’t feel it. In that moment, no blood poured through my body, only memories.

Each footfall took me back to somewhere I knew, but couldn’t remember. A scent of someone’s detergent moving past me in a hallway in the sand in the air, children shouting in the background riding on the winds of the dusk of the evening, the very feeling of cold, hard tile beneath my feet shifting in the rocks; I could feel it.

“Who do you want to be when you grow up?”

I stopped. The slope of the mountain grew steep in front of me, but the voice… it was feminine, but it carried a depth to it. One that I just couldn’t place…

I turned around. Looked to my left. My right.

No one.

“A doctor?”

It was close, almost as if it were in front of me, and behind me, and beside me…

“What kind?”

Who was it? Was it my mind? The exhaustion of the climb must have been heavy. The medication I was on made it hard for me to know if I was thirsty or hungry, and because I never planned to come back down I didn’t bring anything except for my tools with me.

This is bad. This is how they die on these mountains. But I can’t lose it here, not yet.

“A virologist? Do you like viruses?”

I couldn’t rush, as loud as the voice was in my head, it wasn’t pounding just yet. I couldn’t tell if I was tired. I wouldn’t have known the feeling if I tried. That fact was the advantage I had over these hills. That fact was what was going to carry me to the top.

“This is really good! You have a lot of talent! Keep at it. This is going to take you somewhere one day…”

It was a different voice now. Deeper, but bubbly. The kind of voice you would expect to take nothing seriously, and yet is always seemingly genuine. It was his voice.

I didn’t want to rush, but I found my feet skittering against the ground, hoisting my body higher up the slope. At some point, I was going to need to get on my hands again, but for as long as I could, I rushed on my two legs, never once turning back. The stars were crawling out of my shadow now.

As I reached a slope too steep to scurry my way up upright, I fell to my hands, only to feel the shifting of a hardcover book bending on its spine. I looked down. It was a cactus. I moved forward.

In my mind I saw the words: “Don’t stop, keep going! Change the world!” signed in the first page of an anthology of the works of Shakespeare. My arms and legs moved without my mind telling them to do so, almost as if they belonged to someone else. I needed to go higher. I needed to reach that peak. I needed to end it here. Nowhere else but this mountain. The one I always saw just outside my window. The one always just too far away. My father did it and returned. I could not. I needed this.

My backpack grew heavy against my shoulders. A slight throbbing began to spread against my clavicles.

No, I promised it would be today. It has to be today-

“I love you! Try not to get into any trouble, okay?”

My head began to throb.

My body froze. My senses for a split second seemed to return at the new voice: high, light, and just slightly sweet. It cut deep. Deeper than any other had cut before. Pain shot up from my chest. The words of the book spiraled in my mind, intersected by thoughts of setting sun over the peak just at the first half of the climb, thoughts of that hallway and those kids, thoughts of that man and that poem, thoughts of the trouble I…

I hadn’t realized that my hands had relaxed until I felt my body lean backwards. I turned, letting my shoulder hit the ground first, but the momentum carried me backwards still. My body fell into a barrel roll, the weight of my form smashing down through the cactus’s and jagged rocks of the mountain. My body wrapped around an Ocotillo, its thorns stabbing into my battered and broken sides for a second, before the entire trunk buckled beneath my weight, snapping and leaving me to continue to tumble. As I fell, the feeling of my hands and legs slowly began to come back, the throbbing only serving as a momentary distraction from what must have absolutely been the shifting of my ribs and the warmth of blood flowing from somewhere on my head.

My fall was halted by a boulder. My body crashed into it back first, my bag taking the brunt of the impact. The air left my lungs, but I couldn’t breathe any of it back in. My ribs popped and shifted with each shaky exhale and slow, painful inhale. My arm lay at an angle, twisted in what could only be described as “something just not right.”

I couldn’t rise to my feet on that mountain. My body wasn’t listening to me anymore. It wasn’t mine in the first place. As my head laid against the sand of that desert mountain, I heard the sound of muffled voices moving closer.

“... and that’s because you don’t speak life into yourself. You cursed yourself, and I hope you know that if I ever get a call that you died, especially in a bitch-made way, that I’m tipping over your fucking casket.” A laugh followed: it was light and it rippled like droplets into a lake. Like a brook into a stream. The smell of citrus wafted into my nose as my crumpled body laid behind the boulder.

“I love you, pretty girl. If you need anything, please just let me know, I wanna be there for you.”

It was spoken straight into my ears. My throat began to clench and I could taste blood on my tongue.

“In moments like these, you pray.”

My father.

My eyes attempted to stare upwards from where I laid. Just barely, the dark of the night sky and a small spattering of stars poked out from my vision.

God is somewhere there, I thought.

As I opened my mouth to the dim points of light that I could see, I gathered all the strength in my body. I took a breath.

And let a scream rip through my body. To the voices in the mountain, and to the silent eyes of God, watching above.