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jaq-rabbit-3d · 12 days ago

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Stalagmite

4/12/2015

I don’t know how I’ve never written about this, but I've been playing a game every morning since the first month of working here. Usually a couple of minutes before the other teachers arrive I brew the coffee in the lounge. Once the coffee pot is full I move it to the side and just watch the machine drip into the tray. I like the quiet liveliness when the drops fall, rhythmic like polite drums. The game only starts once the dripping slows though. When the space of time between each drop becomes too far for me to visualize a sensible pattern I try to predict which drop will be the last. Somehow, I never predict right. It's strange because the dripping becomes so slow, and yet I never think it's been dripping long enough for it to have reached its end. I always think there has to be more. I only ever truly know which drop will be the last after I see no more fall. Maybe when I predict right I'll stop playing.

I’ll be turning 47 this weekend. Josie, one of my students wished me a happy birthday at the end of class today. She brought me a small smooth piece of rose quartz from home and wanted to ask about it, how it gets its color, and what is quartz anyways? It seems to be everywhere. She’s a great student, and I’m lucky to have her in class. I’m so used to radio silence in the classroom day after day, so to have a student who likes to talk and willingly scribbles down every detail of a lecture about the geological makeup of Oregon is nice. I used to be the same when I was younger.

When I was her age, my geology teacher, Mrs Alanita took the class on a weekend field trip out to Blacklock point. That's what got me interested in geology, looking out at the endless expanse of the cliff sides while my teacher recited the history of this structure that has been changing for a million years. I've thought about taking my classes around Oregon for trips like that. Unfortunately it would have to come from my pockets. I don't have the money and I won’t for a long time.

On another note, Wyatt reached out to me. I was just getting off the bus back home and my phone rang. He happened to be in town doing some west coast road trip and thought it would be cool to meet up again for my birthday.

“There’s this weird little mountain right by the cliffs where we grew up. I'm going to try to find a camp spot for the week, do some hiking. I feel like it would be the kinda thing you'd wanna try too.” His chipper voice didn’t match his age. He’s maybe 8 months younger than I and he sounds just the same as when I last saw him during college.

“I'd love to, but I can't miss work like that. Even this weekend I'll be pretty swamped, lots of work to grade. We could do a short hike, a couple of hours?”

“What? Tell them it's your birthday! They'll give you time off.”

“Unfortunately, I don't think they would.” I strained a sorry smile as if I had been forced to apologize to something, maybe the school? “I wouldn't be able to afford the time off anyways.”

“How about just the weekend? I have some waterproof bags and you can bring your work. C’mon, who knows the next time we'll be able to meet again?”

“You know what, I never take the opportunity to take trips. Yeah, I can do the weekend.”

4/13/2015

Usually when I have trouble sleeping it’s because my brain is overly preoccupied. Last night was the same. I scanned a memory catalog of everything I have in the house, planning what I would bring. What did I need to bring? I don’t have to buy anything do I? My mind went from envisioning the hike I would take, scaling up small banded cliffs to somehow the stress of money. There’s those papers I have to grade too. I couldn’t enjoy myself knowing I would only be delaying the required work to keep me fed. At that moment, I think my body let me sleep just so I can stop thinking.

Wyatt picked me up early in the morning. We were supposed to meet up at the mountain but I had to admit to Wyatt that I didn’t have a car at the moment. I told myself I would get one again maybe 3 years ago? It just didn’t end up happening I guess. Luckily the subject passed over fast when Wyatt started telling me about the place. Apparently the mountain is never talked about. Any pictures of it only exist on social media as a background prop to a selfie, or old family pictures from the 70s. There exists very minimal recorded history about the thing, only confirmation of there being a trail to hike. According to Wyatt it’s a pretty sizable landmark too, one that definitely warrants some kind of title.

“It’s as if it only existed just half a century ago,” Wyatt said with a hopeful grin displaying clear intent to try to pique my interest, which admittedly worked.

After the car made a short drive past the tree line I saw it come into view. How the hell does this thing not have a name? I saw the most beautiful shape. I saw a monolithic column that stretched, begging to touch the sky. It was an old stone church organ, a spiraled stalagmite that had somehow sprouted on the surface and thrived. A conch shell castle tower that wrapped itself in battlements and sturdy mushroom gills. There was not a single fragment of the mountain that was symmetrical despite how interwoven it was with infinite patterns. It stood not high enough to be topped with snow, rather far above it there watched a disk of grey rain clouds that never seemed to move away from the structure throughout the entirety of the drive.

Eventually the car would drift off the road, cautiously threading through the small hills and dips that made up the base of the mountain. We parked without a parking lot and Wyatt would begin to unpack his gear. Right as I got out of the car I started to wander around the grass. On a small hill I took a deep breath in and just watched the soft wind roll across the grass. Then, I felt a flick to the back of my head.

“You gonna help me out with some of this?” Wyatt asked joining me on the top of a small hill, his entire body ornamented with camping bags.

“Oh yes,” I hastily replied while loading my arms. “I think I see the trail? There's a less steep direction over there and I see some little pink flags.”

Wyatt agreed and we began to hike. I loved the warped hilly ground and long grass but man was it tiring. I haven't properly exercised in a long while so immediately I felt the strain in my back, legs, arms, neck, everything. The alarming number of flies didn't help. It's like we were being followed by them. The bags in my hands made it impossible to swat them away and I only was able to ignore them once the trail became a bigger matter, jagged and confusing.

“How are you letting me beat you? Ain't climbing and collecting rocks or whatever your thing?” Wyatt teased after stopping on the trail for the 4th time to let me catch up.

“I didn’t know it was a competition,” I'd reply, mimicking a similar tone. “That was me 20 years ago. I can't run around like a kid these days.”

“Don't tell me you gave up on your rocks!”

“Geology didn’t pay here, it's a small town.”

“Who cares if it pays! You can do your prospecting for fun. Also, you could have moved to the city.”

“I just don't have family money to keep my head out of the water like you when you take your vacations and road trips. My studies got me a job at our old highschool, and that is all. I can’t pay rent with rocks. Hell, I don't even have a car right now.” There was a strange heat I felt in the back of my head saying this. I worried that maybe he would be offended by an admittedly watered down version of what I wanted to say. Wyatt just gave me an awkward smile before redirecting the conversation.

“How about Blackpoint? Have you gone there much?”

“No, not since Mrs Alanita's class. I hope she's doing alright.” She would have loved this little mountain. It was the strangest phenomena about our world that got her smiling. She would describe how crystals don't abide by the traditional factors of creation. In pyrite, nature does make straight lines. I remember talking to her after class for fun about how long things in our world take to form and she went on about how no human in their perception of time could possibly understand such creation. To her, understanding a mountain required living long enough to watch it rise. One day though, in the early summer before break, she just vanished. No final words, or mention from the school. We had substitutes for the final few months, and that's it. I really do hope she is doing alright.

Conversation with Wyatt helped to ignore the pain in my legs throughout the hike. We talked about some of our old trips together from when we were kids. Floras Lake, Wyatt’s parents went there yearly. They took me up there one weekend, just me and his family. I think I was in middle school then. Sometimes I wonder if my parents were just friends with Wyatt’s because they would pay for those long camp outs. I sure loved the trips, but I was always confused as to why they were always with Wyatt. Over time though it didn’t matter so much, I became good friends with him. Now he’s reminding me of when we could compete over who could fit the most mud on the top of their head. We would jump over waves on the beach, refusing to leave the water no matter how cold we got. I was always a bit jealous of how far he could swim, he just had the opportunity to practice more. They went to new beaches every summer, and Wyatt is doing the same now at 46.

Our reminiscing was especially needed as the mountain became steeper in its path, cluttered with jagged stones in branch-like spirals. Before I knew it, we were eating hotdogs and finally escaping the flies with the smoke of the fire. The day passed alarmingly fast, but strangely, I feel like I spent so much time existing in it. We set up our tents on a jutted out, flatter segment of the mountain off the steep trail. Even when I was just sitting down and staring at the grass I had this strange rejuvenating energy that made those moments worth remembering. I am not sure how to explain it, but that’s okay.

My body aches, and all that I wrote so far details only complains. Really though, I’m glad I came here. I live so safe these days, and I think I’m starting to realize that I miss the scraping on my knees. Once I get in my tent I think I’ll be sleeping easy tonight.

4/14/2017

I had a dream last night. I was in a cramped room. It was a wooden box made of graying planks, held together by nails. I was looking through a quarter size hole in one of the walls. There was light on the other side, and a sky. I could see that there was more was out of the room, so I tried to push against the wall and escape. The longer I wondered though, the more I felt a cold pull on the back of my head. Something was trying to turn me the other way but I didn't want to look away from the light. But, it was stronger than me, and I was twisted towards another wall. I thought that the room would be too small for me to move in at all, but it was the perfect size for me. Now, I was face to face with a shadow of my head, and the light that curved around my shape. I think something happened to me last night.

I woke up in a cold sweat, and a strange weight under my skin. I tried to move my arm around in the sleeping bag and my body tensed every muscle in my body. It felt as if my brain didn’t understand which motor functions to operate. What color is my tent? I thought. My eyes darted back and forth in a brief panic before locking with a fly. It spun in my face, up and down in an infinity symbol. I could swear it was laughing at me. I felt my hair stuck on the pillow, weighted down by a heavy humidity. I felt gross.

Blue. The tent is blue. I was able to pull out my arm, yanking it free from the confines of a sweat drenched sleeping bag like a zombie from its grave. My head throbbed and ached trying to recover from an unnatural confusion. I emerged off the ground in a dizzy stammer, almost falling backwards out of my tent. Breathe in, breathe out I had to manually tell my lungs to breathe in, breathe out. There was a sharp stutter I felt in my lungs. The sleeping bag, I was holding onto it. It was dotted with small specks of moss and little clovers growing off of my sweat.

My head spun with theories and rationalizations for what was happening. Eventually I dug into personal fears and started assuming the worst, odd diseases from insects or some kind of fungus. I started to question how long I was asleep for. Fresh air, I needed fresh air.

I almost collapsed by the makeshift fire pit, leaning my shoulder on a rock I used to sit on the night before. Standing above me was a tall rocky slope that led further up the mountain. I could hear a small creek somewhere on the slope, and I listened to it. In my ragdolled state I just let myself recover. Slowly the swirling in my head would calm down and I could now make a fist in my hand without clenching my whole body. The water helped distract me and I was able to direct breathing as a task for my brain again. This was my morning for the next hour before Wyatt woke up.

“Happy 49th!” Wyatt shouted while crawling out from his tent, and walking over to me. “You look tired as hell. What's up?”

“Wyatt,” I slowly rolled my head to face him while still draped over the rock like some dead thing. “I turned 47, not 49.”

“What? No. I'm 49 in a few months, you're not two years younger than me.”

“If you're messing with me, please don't. I woke up disoriented and I think I'm sick”

“Sick? Oh shit. Do you think you need to leave early today?”

“I'll eat first then see how I feel.” I'd push myself up onto the rock and lean in closer to Wyatt. “So you're really saying I'm 49? It's 2015, I know that for a fact. I write the date in my journal with the year every night.” For a moment I posed the thought.

If I really am that age, what did I do at 48? Nothing, there was nothing because Wyatt was making a joke. I heard him say something about me waking up confused. I don't recall exactly what he said because I was drowning in that same thought as well. I'm not at that point of my age, am I? Inching to 50 and already waking up confused in the morning. Does dementia run in the family? I don't know, or do I just not remember? Maybe I am 49. Maybe the years just went by. 2013 went in a flash, and so did 2014, and 15.

“I can't have just lost time like that, ” I said with a small aching whimper in my voice. “What year is it Wyatt?”

“It’s 2017.” I know when he's pulling jokes. There is always a grin painted on his cheeks. He was not smiling. He was quiet in his voice, worried for me. I checked my phone to confirm, and there it was, 2017.

I didn't have much of an appetite, but I had to eat something. Wyatt brought the ice cooler over. One by one I popped watermelon chunks and bits of jerky into my mouth. Of course the flies came again. While we ate in silence I suddenly slammed the palm of my hand onto the cooler trying to squash a fly in a spout fit of frustration. It easily avoided and landed on the back of my hand. Why won’t the flies just leave me alone?

Looking back at 2015, and several years before, what did I do? I mostly remember just working and being at home. I remember scenes from movies I liked, but that’s not my life. My most potent memories are of the classroom. When I first started teaching, I tried to teach geology my way. I was so excited at the thought of spending every day talking about rocks the same way Mrs Alanita did. I miss setting up those class debates for students to argue over whether ice is a rock. The school shut it down, and that decision reminded me that I am here just to do the school’s job. It is not my subject, it’s a curriculum. In fact, I'm not even teaching geology. It's combined earth science. It’s a basic cycle that I must follow.

At least the coffee is good. No, it's not good. It's okay. The coffee put a stain on my shirt that I cannot ignore. It's huge, on the left center of my white blouse. It's in a weird shape that just makes it stand out even more. The stain is permanent no matter how I wash it. It was likely inevitable with how much coffee I drink. Still, I wear it. Why do I wear it so often though?

“I don't think I've ever taken one of my classes on a field trip,” I admitted.

“Oh, well, what's stopping you? I know all kinds of local spots greater than this ol’ mountain. There is not a year I go by where I am not going on my own field trips. You can just go and do it!” Wyatt said in a demeanor similar to a dad trying to inspire his bullied son.

“No. Don't start this ‘just do it cause you want to man’ thing again,” I interrupted. “Money is stopping me, time, and energy. We are not in the same boat. I do not have the means or resources to go off and pursue other things on a whim. I can not venture away from my stability. Sometimes it’s easier to find adventure in just trying a new brand of ice cream, alone in my living room. Yes, it's not my childhood wish and dreams but I'm nearly 50 now. I can't play in the mud anymore.”

“Not in the same boat? What do you mean?”

“We just live different lives. You can run around and stand just fine. I see your posts online, always somewhere new. That’s great man, I’m happy for you, but I can’t do that. When I leave my home, I’m sick and weak. I don’t need you to try to teach me something using your own life as some great depiction of wisdom. You live easy Wyatt, on your path.”

“But, when we were kids, we were always out on our little adventures. Climbing trees and stuff.” Wyatt said in a quiet murmur. “I came through town in part to reconnect. I wanted to check out some of our old spots and explore some new ones.”

I could see his hands awkwardly shift around to find his pockets. “What about Alanita? She was about your age and still ecstatic, so full of life. You’re a teacher now, doing geology just like her. You have to be putting some energy into that! I mean, that’s what got you into rocks right? Seeing how passionate she was.”

“Yeah, she had all of that passion, and ended up just as another employee. She lived paycheck to paycheck before finally losing it and disappearing. By now she's dead.”

“Paycheck to paycheck, sure. The impact that she had on you though has to mean something, right? It at least means something to you.”

“I guess… Yeah.” It's true. She meant a lot to me as a teacher. I think I considered her a friend when I was in school. In the back of my mind I might have clung on to some fabricated hope that I would hear her name again. I thought that maybe she would come back as evidence of her passion, as something great.

“We can leave if you need. Ready to head back?” Not once during this trip did I miss home.

“I just want to find the creek real quick. I can hear it, I'd like to see it before I go.”

Wyatt gave me a soft “sure” and recognized that I needed some time. Following the soft babbling of the creek, I inched around the jagged rocks that lead further up the mountain. It was off the main trail and so steady land was interrupted by odd rounded pillars reminiscent of deep sea thermal vents. I can’t figure out how these things exist here. There is no dripping roof to form it. I thought of mug stalagmites, where formations are created through erosion rather than a depositional. However it may be, nature doesn’t care. I knew I was getting close once I started seeing greener plant life again. I’ve never seen vines wrap around a stalagmite, it’s pretty. Eventually I’d find moss grown over spiraled stone and small bushes standing at the edge of a creek.

There was another flat protrusion from the mountain in which a small pond formed from the water. I sat by it, and listened. An odd corner of the world this is. Barely anyone has talked about it, and I wonder how unique it is for me to be here. There exists this steady calm flow of water, surrounded and shaped by deep cave formations I’d only see on old science textbooks. I wouldn’t have found this if I decided that I couldn’t afford the time to be here. Before resting my eyes, I took the opportunity to write in my journal. I wrote the date, and in my muscle memory I put down 2017. I can’t keep up with my own body. I don’t want to leave here. Give me more time.

4/15/2023

Cold water and mud vomited from my mouth. An unnatural weight evacuated from deep within my lungs. I gasped for air and choked on the mud that remained lodged in my throat. There was no means to rationalize anything, waking from a macabre unconsciousness that left my head drowning in panic.

I was on the ground, and turned on my side by Wyatt who hovered above me. I heard his voice in a trembling shout but I couldn't latch onto his words. There was a deep cold under my flesh that my arms begged to release, clenching onto the gravel stabbing my body from under me. Once again I had to force my convulsing lungs to steady. Breathe. Breathe.

I was aware of myself now, and the first thing I processed seeing were several rows of stationary flies standing on the rocks besides me. It was raining, and the flies were unbothered, as if it is their sole intention to be here. The flies were watching me, judging me, waiting for something to happen that did not come to be.

“You're breathing. Oh thank god, talk to me. What happened?” Wyatt crouched lower to meet my eyes. I didn’t meet his gaze, instead I watched the rain drop off from his face, and I glared at the flies behind it. Wyatt begged for me to speak, to tell him what happened, but I think I was already dragged into a conversation with the flies. “You're only alive for weeks,” I thought. “What do you do in that time?”

“We fly,” announced a voice. I wasn’t sure if it was one I made up in my lucid state, but it sure didn’t sound like my voice. I heard it from every falling raindrop, every insect on the rocks, and from deep within my drowning lungs. “I can't fly,” I replied in thought.

“You can climb.”

The flavor of cold mud coated my tongue. It drooled out from the corner of my mouth and held my cheek. I didn’t have the energy or care to clean it off. All of my strength was being used to haul myself forward. Wyatt was now leading me back to the campsite, lifting me upright with an arm under mine. I was bleeding. We almost didn't catch it with how fast the rain washed it away. It became apparent when Wyatt noticed scattered patches of split skin under my neck and around the sides of my face. As I was dragging forward I felt small open wounds that I didn’t have before scraping my drenched clothes. I could feel it all over my body as if the rain painted them on me. Strangely though, what bothered me most was that of my eyes. It felt sharp and I couldn’t stop rubbing it

According to Wyatt, I was gone a good couple of hours. He followed the direction I went and found me face down in the creek, unconscious. Spread across my back were the flies, grubs and centipedes. That could explain the wounds, eating at me like I was long gone and ready to rot away into the stream. He thinks I did something, got overly sick or made the fall myself. I was partly offended by that last part, the last thing I would want to do is cut my life short. Last I remember, I was sitting by the edge of the creek, writing in my journal. I closed my eyes shortly after to rest. It’s possible I fell asleep, and it’s possible I dropped into the water. Surely though, I would have woken up from that. Maybe I fell head first and was knocked unconscious. If that were the case I think we would have found some injury on my head.

Wyatt checked, instead he noticed what he described to be a crack in my right eye. In the bottom corner of my vision I did see a small black line, like a hair. I thought it was maybe just a bit of debre on my face, maybe it’s an eyelash? Noticing that thing in my eye, it quickly became an annoyance that surpassed the deep wet cold grasping my body. I had to get rid of it.

Once we got back to the campsite, Wyatt dashed to the tents to retrieve blankets and fire supplies. The rain had breached the tent fabric and soaked the wood already. Luckily, in the water proof bags there were some space blankets and spare dry clothes. Huddled over the supplies in his arm he practically fell on top of me with everything before tightly wrapping a space blanket around me.

“Get into dry clothes, and wrap yourself tight in the blanket. I’m going to try to start a fire” His voice was stuttering more than mine, I don’t think I saw him blink once we got to the camp. Wyatt helplessly began trying to find a way to start the fire in the rain, spewing angry mutters to himself as if he was speaking a new language. I sat by the pit and was vigorously rubbing my eye trying to get rid of the hair, or whatever it was. I wasn’t so bothered by rain or cold, just my eye.

“I’m fine Wyatt” I muttered, watching him struggle in the wet ash. “I’m not that cold.”

“What? You’re not?” Wyatt spun his head around and locked eyes with me, aghast.

“Let's keep going, up the trail,” I muttered. I didn’t have the strength to stand, but I promised to anyway.

“No, I got to get you back home, it's raining real bad, you're sick!”

“Right now I still have the means to walk, so I wanna walk.”

“You have work in the morning though, you said you needed to be there. You need to warm up and rest.”

“Oh at this point I'm much too sick to go in tomorrow, I'll call out.”

“I can't in good conscience let you keep going.” Wyatt stopped struggling with the drenched fire fit and marched up to me.

“Well I’m going to keep climbing. You can leave if you want. I’m sure you’ll have the time to come back up here when it’s sunny again, right?”

“This whole trip you’ve been acting so, so weird. What has gotten into you man?” There was a confused chuckle in his voice. “I thought you hated this trip, now you want to keep going?”

“Hate it? No!” I stood up firm from the ground in a dizzy stammer. “ I’m terrified, and I'm cold, but I like the mountain. I want to be here.”

“You said you weren't very-”

“I lied. In fact, I feel as if my fingers could fall off at any moment, but I don’t want to worry about being cold or sick. If I am sick, I’d rather reach the top of the mountain sick”

“Fine. I am going to come with you. I don’t care if you don’t want me to. I am worried about you.” Wyatt said with an anxious pat on my shoulder. He feels me shivering, reminded of just how cold I really was. I don’t protest. “Do please change into some warm clothes though.”

With only about half of our supplies, we made our way up the trail once more. The rain would only strengthen, continuing its assault on us. In just the first few minutes, we were shakily grasping at the rocks and thinning plant life to hold us off the ground. There came a point in which we simultaneously looked back toward the camp site below us, only to realize that it was already out of sight. The grey skies and twirling downpour washed away the clear outlines of shadows. The dips and spikes in the rock required careful study in order to find the safest steps. As well, the carved out trail would malform with the unnatural rock formations throughout this tower. We no longer had pink flags to mark where to go. My path here on out is one I chisel with every cold breath. I crawl and scale in silence long enough to see the sun change its position in the sky. The occasional beacon of light shredding through the murky clouds acts as my compass to reach the sky. I hear Wyatt hollar in the rain.

“We should really think about going back to camp before it gets dark!” I hear him beg, now he’s the one trailing behind.

“Isn’t this what you wanted? I thought we wanted me to dive head first into the water, eyes closed. I thought this is how we live, right? We just ignore the internal yelling that tells us to stay home.”

“Not like this! Obviously you need to care for yourself first! I never forced you to come with me. What the hell do you want? Do you want to go home, or keep climbing?” Wyatt shouted, exasperated. I turned around to face Wyatt and stopped moving. My mouth agape, I searched for the right words to say. Instead though, I blurted out something else involuntarily.

“What do you think it’s going to be like to not exist?”

“What? Like when we die?” Wyatt asks in a confused recoil. “I mean, there are hundreds of ideas of what the afterlife might look like, heaven and whatnot.”

“There can only be one answer though. As far as I know, the only thing we truly are is our thoughts. We experience all things through bodily sensations and chemicals that touch our brain and we live in our consciousness. When our brain dies though, we can’t touch the world anymore. If we are our minds, then when we die, we are just gone.”

“That’s why we have to live every day to our fullest!” Wyatt says with an awkward smile, knowing how corny I find that phrase. “That’s what I’ve tried to do, and that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for a while now. I understand though that it’s not so easy for you with the weight of your own life. There are different, better ways to live besides constant play. I was wrong for trying to tell you otherwise.”

“No, you didn’t force anything upon me. I’m actually very thankful that you pushed me to come on this trip. I’ve needed a bit of uncertainty in my life, a bit of fear, life outside of my monotonous safety.”

“That’s why you’re still climbing? You’re catching up on some thrill you never had.”

“Yes. I can’t help but think that it’s not enough though. There is an entire world out there, with an infinite number of experiences and I can only grasp onto a small handful. Our creator, whether it be god or just the supreme mathematical logic of the universe, only gave us about 80 years or so.”

“No one could possibly experience everything.”

“I know, and it’s selfish to believe you need to live long enough to do so. I can’t help but wish otherwise though. It’s the thought that this is the only existence I'll ever know and I am not going to stay here permanently. You’ve lived your life to see so much more than I have, and you’ve held onto it for longer. It’s like you’ve never changed. I can still see the face you had all of those years ago. I haven’t been out to the lakes since our old vacations. I haven’t been to the beaches. I haven’t gone on a country long road trip like I see you posting about online. I want to though. I want to see everything, listen to every song, taste every bit of food, have a conversation and laugh with every person. I want to swim in the ocean, run butt naked in the snow, parachute off a building. I want to play golf on the moon, then play tennis on mars. I want to have a family, and a husband, or wife. I never had the time to figure that stuff out. I want to discover a new cave and make it my home. I want to own every kind of rock and crystal. I don’t want to die. I’m so scared Wyatt. I don't want to not exist anymore.” My voice strains with a soft whimper as if my tongue had failed to hold back my words. Wyatt quickens a few steps and puts a hand on my shoulder. The rain disguises any tears on my face but I think Wyatt could see them anyways.

“No one alive knows what death is like. All there is to fear is the unknown. From the sounds of it, you’ve regretfully missed out on a lot of potential life because of fear. Don’t let the unknown overtake you. That’s all death is, something other than life we haven’t seen yet.”

“Being up here on the mountain has strangely been the single greatest experience I’ve had in about a decade. This has been the first time I’ve slept somewhere other than my bed. I almost said no. I almost abandoned this calling just so I can return to the road of monotony with utmost energy.”

“You say monotony a lot as if being a teacher doesn’t mean anything. You’ll exist in the lives of new generations.” There was a thick stutter in his voice, struggling to figure out the right string of words. “Mrs. Alanita made so much of who you are today. You’re teaching the same subject, and the same class grade she taught. You are her, and she still exists in this world because of it. What you are doing as a teacher will exist within people after you die. If you ask me, you are more than your mind. Humans are too social and complicated to only be defined by what happens to us.”

“Most of my students zone out in class, or fall asleep. I am not making that kind of impact on them.”

“Most is not all” Wyatt pressed me, daring me to say that he was wrong. I twirled the piece of rose quartz Josie gave me between my fingers. Despite how cold I feel under my skin, the polished stone was warm. It was an independent fragment of potential energy carved from the world, and passed between us humans. I’ve been holding it this whole time.

“There are some students who definitely remind me of myself, or Alanita. I’m sure that some kids will grow up with an even greater love for geology than I did. I wonder what Josie will become.” For a moment, my focus warped back to the cliffs. I stared up into the sky and saw the top of the mountain blur with the rain. The sun was behind it, outlining a jestering shape that seemed to be constantly changing every time I looked up at this castle tower. The growing shadows marked the introduction of an evening sky.

“I used to talk to Alanita after class just like Josie does with me. There was that month when she got really quiet, right before she disappeared. She told me about this plan she has when she dies. On her coffin would be some large funnel connected to a carved out hole right above her forehead. Conditions had to be perfect, constant rain, low winds. It had to be here in Oregon.”

“She was kinda strange, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah, I liked that about her though. When I was a student I thought she knew something that I didn’t. Something that carved her a purpose to be content with. A single piece of philosophy great enough to make death worth it.”

“Are you saying that life is not worth death?”

“I am not following.”

“Well, like-”

“No, I get it. I suppose you could think of our existence as being worth death. We find our own philosophies to live and die on.”

“Yeah man, words right out of my mouth”

“When I was turning 47, I celebrated by looking up the average life expectancy. I remember it by heart. 78.8. What year is it now? Last I remember, you said it was 2017.”

“No, it's 2023,” Wyatt answered solemnly, not even looking at me. I hate to have to make him the bearer of bad news. It doesn't come at surprise though. I had a feeling my time was running thin.

I feel as if this mountain is playing tricks on me. There are gaps in my journal, years worth of missing entries. Every morning I wake up here it seems as another handful of years skipped over me. I see Wyatt turning older, new wrinkles wrapping his face that I haven’t seen just a few days ago. I see it in my own hands, the way they shake. It’s in the way my skin shrinks around my knuckles. This warping of time, it’s within me. When I write in my journal, I write the date of the new year without thinking. If this is anything supernatural, then it’s not really skipping time. We still are still living through the years. I could go to sleep tonight and go by another 10 years. I could die tonight.

“If I were to live another life, I would have lived weird. I won't have another life though, so…” My voice grew a small bit louder, and firm. There was an emptying drain from my lungs I could feel in just that small increase in volume. I extended my hand to Wyatt.

“Do you have any scissors? Any kind of knife?”

“I might have something,” Wyatt said steadily, seemingly concerned about me asking that question. He dug into his pockets and found a small pocket knife. Before he could even ask why, I'd casually scoop the knife out of his hand and aim it up towards my head. With my other hand, I gathered a bundle of my hair in a twist. Then I began to haphazardly cut.

I could feel a sharp pain from the pull and sawing of my hair. The knife was a sloppy tool for the job, leaving fickle cuts that tore off segments of the bundle, bit by bit. My hair floated down my body like slick leaves, extinguishing a weight that I never realized existed on my head. Finally, the first locks of hair disappeared into the mud, and was being stomped down by the rain. I would grab another fist full of hair, and another in a feverish cacophony of cuts. The demanding twirl with my blade made me nick the side of my head. A small string of blood fell down my face parallel to the rain. I only paused once I saw the red drop hanging from my eyelash. Through the tinted lense I saw the flies watching me from the rocks once more. I listened inside myself to see if I could hear the voice that spoke to me. All I heard was my breathing, cramp in my chest.

Once the blood washed down my I turned to Wyatt with a smile.

“So… How do I look?” A soft chuckle crooked from my throat.

“You remember when we snuck into the back of the supermarket back in elementary? You look like that lady who yelled at us.” Wyatt replied with a joking smile. The rest of his face though, I could not read. It was something new, maybe testing the waters to jester.

“Oh don’t say that! I would have been less offended if you just said I looked like shit.” I said with a similar grin, laughing through my words. Wyatt joined me, mocking what that lady yelled at us, which made us laugh even more. I ran my hand along the top of my head, feeling where I carved new polka dot spots. Then I layed down under the rain, and we continued talking about how we both tried to take the blame. We talked about that time we tried to hatch an egg with a heatlamp, and the rotten stench of the aftermath. We talked about the time Wyatt’s father found makeup in his desk and I made up a story about how I left it there, and that it was actually mine. I haven’t laughed like this in a long time, like a full belly laugh. And I didn’t know you could fall asleep doing so.

4/16/2032

Where am I writing this? There was no moment in the day for me to write so how am I writing this? Why does it feel like I'm writing right now? Why did I write that? I am writing this right now, or I will write this later. I'm not sure when I'm writing this. What am I writing about?

I looked at other pages of my journal to see how I usually start writing about my day. I don't really write about my day though, or at least not the important moments of the day. I write about small things. I write about what I think about when I tie my shoes. I write about the breakroom coffee machine. I write about what I see while on the bus. Sometimes I write about the more serious worries and confusions in my life, but it pairs with the tiny memories, the annoying coffee stains on my clothes. The only thing these thoughts have in common is that I don't say them out loud. That doesn't sound like a very meaningful reason though, isn't that what a diary already is for?

On the first day of every new school year, I somehow always end up wearing that coffee stained blouse. Maybe I like the stain.

I lurched my head up off the ground and gasped for air. A morning sun beamed down upon my jagged body, just the same as the stones it lays on. It just barely warms my skin enough to stay alive. I face the dim light, neck outstretched like the stem of a rose, begging to absorb the sun on winter solstice.

The rain never stopped, instead now falling down as a solid wall of water. The inner warmth of my body has trailed too weak to warm up the rain that I would be forced to swallow. I don't know if it was the sun that woke me, or the shouting of white noise from the rain.

Where my head had laid sits my cut hair from the night before, glued to the rocks. In lifting myself up, I disturbed the shallow mountain of flies that had been sitting on my skin. They then swarmed the pile of hair, presumably to feast.

The crack in my eye has grown and split my pupil in two. It multiplied my perception of the summit and I saw a full range rather than one mountain. The image of this structure warps and blurs the more I climb and yet I know, I just know with every passing day that the peak will be beautiful.

Then I rose up off the ground and began to march again. I would barely be able to hold my body upright. There was a growing fatigue in my legs, leaving what felt like spongy, empty splotches within my bones. I felt like some injured bird, climbing a height that it once thought would only be possible with wings.

I turned behind me to try to find Wyatt, and let him catch up. I forget that he's dead sometimes. It's been another handful of years that have gone by too fast. The days seem to go by more linear and steady than the years. Does that make sense? I don't know. I can't remember the past as a coherent structure. I can’t measure the distance between past events. I question if there is any truly accurate measurement of time. The past all just exists as a tapestry embroidered by the hours and decades prior. Now I look at the top of the mountain as another piece of patchwork that I hope to sew into me.

78.8 Years. I'm 64 now. No matter how old I get, the lifespan of all things is either short enough for me to see the entirety of, or it'll extend past days I'll never see. It's an obvious truth but one I never think about until something that I care about goes away. It's in those days that I also think about all that I will miss. Maybe that's why I never had kids, another important thing whose number of days I couldn't predict.

Wyatt, I’m sorry. In the last moments I shared with you we got to laugh, but I should have said sorry one more time. I should have been on the whole road trip with you. There are a lot of things I watched go away, a lot of people. I always thought that there wasn’t the time to say goodbye, but if I'm afraid, then I’ll never say goodbye. I should have done a lot of things in my life.

“Why do you follow me?” I think, watching the flies rise again when I take my next steps forward. The flies answer through their buzzing, one surrounding voice that orchestrates as a low hum. The tone is static and unchanging, but its song makes a booming harmony. Under my flesh, the singing rings louder than the rain.

“We are not following,” Says the flies. “We are only parallel.”

“What's at the top?” I ask.

“More of us, and there will be more to join.”

My foot slipped under the gravel and I fell to my knees. Reaching forward to cushion my fall, my hands scraped against the gravel which was descending with me. I scrambled my feet into the rocks to find some kind of support. I caught myself, grabbing onto one of the cave stone spires. The mountain has gotten much steeper, and the water falling down it threatened to avalanche my path, streaming between the loose stones.

Rain pounded the back of my head like cold stones of their own. Tender wounds from the creek opened on my arms as I threw them forward, gripping onto stable rocks. From the ground, my split pupils could see far above me. I could still see the summit. I was close, so close.

There was no more warmth in my body. There was no more movement in my organs. Like the first morning on this monolith, the mechanical tasks of my flesh became manual requirements. I was playing the drums of my body, and my heartbeat became the percusion to the symphony of the flies. I was a dying metronome with every purposeful breath. Through the gritted teeth of my mind, I keep asking questions.

“Does the mountain know?”

“It's a stalagmite. It might know, it might not. If it does, it would not know us individually. We are only small creatures.”

Fractions of time seemed to divide further from each other. Every inch I crawled, and pulled across the rock was its own age. I could feel the track of every pebble that rolled under my arms when I moved them. To blink was a dedication, a resource that cost a moment of being unaware of my surroundings. I blinked, and asked one more question while my eyes were closed in that split second.

“Doesn't that make you feel insignificant?”

“If it does know us. It knows the collective, and so it knows each of us. You don't know every grain of sand, but you know the beaches that it makes up. You know the story of how every grain of sand was shaped and carved by millions of years of erosion.”

Alanita would have told me something like that, a hidden life lesson she disguised in one of those geology rambles I would have with her before going home. Josie would have eaten that up. At times I've found myself doing the same. Taking some phrase from my old teacher that stuck with me and sliding it into my own classroom.

I said something about how all modern science is built off from previous works. A little something about human progress being parallel with community. Josie took that to heart and wrote one of her essays with the same message. It detailed how 20th century studies around the interior of the earth were first influenced by tectonic plate studies in the 60s and the continental drift proposal in 1912. It was the highest graded essay in the class. I had to reread it because I could have sworn that a few of the phrases she wrote were identical to things Alanita told me.

My eyes were still closed in that brief moment of a blink. In the nothingness I heard the cascading of a large stone. My eyelids begged to be ripped open, but it all came too fast. By the time I could see again I was struck by the falling stone. My eye was shattered once again, and I fall cold.

4/17

I wake up enveloped by a blanket of dead flies. The rain has stopped, and so has the pressure of my breathing. I am dry and weightless. The flies are static and stiff like forgotten scraps of paper and dust. Just as weightless as me, they flutter down my body as I rise from the shallow hill. The harsh noise of the rain is replaced with the gentle cascade of old flies and residue raindrops falling from a softer sky. Unperturbed by the pull of gravity, I emerge above the ground with little pressure on the spongy surface that the insects make up.

My skin is thin, and bleeding tears from under my glass shattered my eyes. I see through pupils split in every direction, and my iris is tinted with blood. Like looking through rose quartz, a fractured crystal reflecting light through all spectrums. I see the past, present and future. I see every word I write down in this journal and I am writing every word in this journal.

I see the summit where I am now, the land in which all flies drop dead. The stalagmite grows taller with every last insect. From the surface, the peak looks sharp and formidable, the very structure of this tower is of an incomprehensible nature. It’s a looming presence for all, with few spoken words attached without dread.

I don't take another step, I drift forward. Less and less do I see the stalagmite rock, rather in reaching the summit I see the sky. In the shards of my eye, reflections of the sun and moon sit at a standstill in opposite directions. Bands of silver and gold snake between the clouds and fragment into thin strings that intertwine into nothingness. They break even finer into the specks of stars. Everything feeds into each other, decaying into their smallest fragments to then be something bigger. The colors of the sky swirl and melt into one settled, cold canvas in which everything is equally divided.

The last raindrops find the highest point in a diminishing rhythm, on white rock that buds like a crystal. It's bone from someone before me, warping to the water and growing higher. The bone had sprouted through a small hole in a wooden casket. It was hard to see, the wood was nearly buried by the dead flies making up most of the ground. I sat by the coffin, and looked outward past the summit.

It is not the mountain that is beautiful, but rather the view at the end. It's the view I will contribute to building, as will everyone else.

I see the sky, but as well I see the stalagmite’s decent and the surface. In just the decades of this mountain's discovery, there is witness to a thousand million years of change. Parallel to the sky are bands in the rock. Long streaks of different ages, different soils and scarring. eroded pebbles and sand whittled down by every drop of rain, including the final few I see around me falling. At the bottom are trees, new life thriving on the oldest parts of the mountain. Unforgotten, it is at the base that the next paths are born and started.

There is a familiar face down there. She sees the climb as daunting, but unavoidable. She doesn't know what will be at the top, and it scares her. In past days she once knew a strange, and maybe sad voice of mentorship that could tell her what to expect. It was a voice that seemed to always answer her questions. That voice disappeared a long time ago though and now she has to find her own answers.

Don't worry Josie. I'll watch you through the flies.

And I'll watch the final drop of rain fall, knowing that this one is the last.

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