Mind Me, The Mountain
White Knuckles and bruised ego,
I climbed up what I thought was Everest when I was young,
Getting to the top took time,
Blood,
The breath in my lungs,
And when I reached the top it was beautiful.
So beautiful I could see the horizon line and the spin of earth around my cut up fingers.
Then, I saw another mountain.
Taller,
Further,
Forboding me in its ancient wordless language.
A surge of drawn out dawn,
The sun cresting that hill,
And I realized,
I never summited Everest,
I summited a mountain sure,
It took all my breath,
Broke all my bones,
Pulled fourth the blood from my body,
And gave me bends.
But I never summited Everest.
Even to this day,
Mountains have passed,
Day in,
Day out,
I climbed,
Burned,
Broken,
But at the end of the day,
I still know I haven’t summited Everest.
My biggest hurdle will come one day,
No matter how small I feel,
No matter how broken I am.
There are bodies on Everest.
Most die trying to summit their biggest problems.
We use their corpses as a marker,
Driving us to climb higher,
Driving us to do better,
The dead tell better stories than the living because the dead have always been the subject.
But the chill in their bones,
The ice on their preserved remains,
They act against them.
Keep their brittle hands from penning the most important of stories.
The dead are visual storytellers.
No hands to write,
No mouth to speak,
But still their stories are best read from the front row,
They play charades beneath our feet.
I know I haven’t climbed Everest yet,
But my friends,
My family,
All the ghosts from my past will be there when I do.
They’ll pick me up when I fall,
Strengthen my grip on rocky slopes,
And with the people I lost on the way,
And the ones still around.
I will summit Everest.
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