The Highest Point

Top of the morning. Chidi wakes up when the city still belongs to the birds, chirping as they hold their morning assembly. He puts on comfortable clothes and his hiking boots.

She is the one who got him into hiking. At first, he didn’t see the point. He was a sports guy—he didn’t dislike nature, but he rarely walked except to get from point A to point B, and only when necessary. Usually, that necessity meant his car had broken down. Let’s not lie, he found hiking to be a white people’s activity—one of those things they did obsessively to occupy their overthinking minds, impress their peers, and meet their look-alikes.

"It will calm your mind! Nature heals," his white friends had told him over and over, trying to convince him to join them. But to Chidi, the idea of climbing a mountain every weekend just to confuse the devil of the mind—forcing it off its familiar pathways—felt like an exhausting, time-consuming trick. He already knew other techniques—some might call them unhealthy coping mechanisms, but as far as he was concerned, humans had been using them since the dawn of time. So despite the persistence of his well-meaning but deluded friends, he always refused to hike.

Until he met her. 

After he met her, he would do anything just to be around her. He was utterly fascinated. He developed the kind of love addiction that makes another person feel like a body part, so that being apart from them causes actual, physical pain. And so, he followed her—to the mountains.

He loved walking behind her, watching her buttocks move as she climbed, witnessing her delight at every flower and plant, inhaling the subtle scent of her sweat by the end of the day. But what truly sealed his love for hiking was the moment he realized that, in nature, she was all his. Up there, they were isolated—no phone, no internet, no work, no other people. Nothing to distract her attention from him. Just her, undivided, uninterrupted. She was all his. His thirst for her was finally quenched. He was like a baby who, after drinking his fill, burps and sits, satisfied. His cup was full. His body was whole.

"Maybe this is what my friends meant by healing," he thought, amused at the irony.

He wasn’t blind to nature, not completely. But to him, the landscape was just a vast playground for his love. Nature held her captive, and delivered her to him in her purest, rawest, most lovable form. In his eyes, nature was her, growing out of her, indissociable.

The day she left him, she gave him the bad news under the lowest tree in the forest. They had been walking all day, up and down, but something was off. She was restless and elusive. She kept adjusting her pace, either speeding up or slowing down, turning the hike into a frustrating game of musical chairs. She kept chatting with the guide, deliberately ignoring him—but not in the usual way, not in the way designed to make him chase her. This was different. She was irritated. Irreconcilably so. 

She had nowhere to escape on this giant playground, nowhere to run—but this time, the captivity was not an outlet for their love. It trapped her, mind and body. In this vast, open space, her attempts to escape became even more obvious. And because nothing masked it, he saw it in the clearest, rawest way.

They kept walking. It was all they could do.

He felt despair creeping into his heart. And by the time they drove back to the city, she was gone. She never answered his texts again.

Since then, he hikes whenever he can. It has become an obsession. He hikes as far, as long, and as high as his body allows. He hikes to reach the love he hopes she would have given him. Or maybe to relive the happiness of their hikes. Or maybe just to forget himself. Whatever the reason, he walks, endlessly.

Sometimes, he gets gripped with anxious thoughts—the devil of the mind, he reckons—but he keeps climbing, searching for liberation. He does not hike to forget. No. And not to heal, either. No, no. He hikes to remember. He hikes to be absorbed, and consumed—to be swallowed whole by the feeling, the memory, his own breath.

One day, as he ascends the highest peak he has ever attempted—5,000 meters above sea level—he goes over his memories of her, true and imagined. And then, suddenly, a thought takes hold of him. A voice—inner or external, impossible to tell—whispers to him.

"Her true self is still hidden in the forest, waiting for you, here in this isolated world, your perfect world. Her essence, the isolated and captive her, the one who was yours, utterly yours—is still here. There is nothing that could make her leave you, here in the mountains. If you look for her long enough, she will appear. Nature grows out of her. All you have to do is cater to it."

He stares at the barren landscape for what seemed to him like a very long time. They are high enough now that trees and plants have become sparse. The playground is naked. There is nowhere for her to hide.

Then, he feels the wind against his neck, and he knows it is her.

He stops. It is an ice-cold, but gentle breeze. It brushes again against his neck, under his scarf, then wraps around it, tightening—softly, sensually—just like her fingers used to when she choked him during their love-making, looking into his eyes.

He wonders if he is imagining this. Perhaps he is conjuring the wind, the sensation. But what is reality in the face of obsession? What is reality compared to his truth?

Reality is his ever-existing truth. And he is made of it.

It does not matter.

The wind continues to follow him, sometimes tapping his shoulder, grazing his ear, wrapping around his throat. From time to time, it chokes him gently, as if reminding him of its presence.

Then, suddenly, it stops.

Although it was only a light breeze, its absence feels suffocating. The heavy, dry, oppressive atmosphere falls upon Chidi. Panic grips him. She is leaving him again.

Still, he keeps walking. He tells himself that, like the desperate Orpheus, if he turns around to look at her, he will lose her forever.

Slowly, slowly, he moves forward. The atmosphere thickens. His breathing gets heavier. And despite his resolve, he cannot help himself. He turns.

She is not there.

But the mountain’s slope has steepened—drastically, impossibly so. And before he can react, an unseen force pushes him from behind.

He falls.

He rolls.

He tumbles down the mountainside for what feels like an eternity.

When he finally reaches the bottom, he lifts his head. And there she is. Standing before him.

He kneels at her feet. She does not speak. She only looks at him, majestic, unshaken.

Then, she begins to expand. Growing larger and larger, progressively taking form. Her body stretches into the mountain itself. She becomes the mountain. Her hair is the rustling leaves. The dandelion seeds are her eyelashes. The thick roots of the oldest trees become her hands.

His legs rest against her body, and with one trembling hand, he reaches out. He touches the ground. It is a cold night, yet the soil feels warm. Just like her. He lies down, and lets himself sink into the earth, like in a swamp, fearless. He is wrapped in her embrace. He is whole again. A satisfied baby.

And then—

He wakes up.

His chest rises and falls, breathless. Two worried eyes stare down at him.

"Are you okay, my brother?"

He sits up, looking around. He is in a refuge—the last shelter before the mountain’s final ascent. A small group of hikers surrounds him, their faces full of concern.

"Everything is okay. You had altitude sickness. You’ll be alright. Don’t be scared."

But he is not scared.

He smiles.

His love for the mountains has only grown.

He promises himself: next time, he will climb even higher.