No 1.
We’ve stopped over at a lookout point without a name facing the same monotonous beauty that has surrounded us for hours. Mountains cradle the land here. Streaked with layers of time, each coloured stripe denoting a space between the first and the last.
I wonder if there’s ever going to be such thing as a “last” here?
What’s the last moment a mountain ceases to exist? Mountains don’t share time with humans.
They are time. Existing is gradual.
The speed of human life, in comparison, is exhausting. It’s no wonder we’re always tired.
The sky filters my view with a delicate blue tint. I think of the layers of my life like the ones I see in these sedimentary giants. I wonder what stories these mountains would tell us…
Here’s where silence once extended so far it was booming, and had its own character and gravity. Here’s where the first of men found us and made homes near our bases, in our shoulders and ribs. Here’s where we were blown out, scraped away. Here’s where…
No 2.
The crows are as big as chickens here.
And oily black.
No 3.
We sit wrapped in mountain ranges. Sierra Nevada, El Paso, Panamint.
Like we’re held up in the breathing rib cage of the Earth.
We’re 190 feet below sea level, two hours ago we were 4000 feet above it.
Staring out into an ocean of expansive rock, I keep trying to find the nurturing in it, but this land is hostile.
God’s land, without mercy.
The cliffs drop violently, the mountains yawn, unobligingly open to the road. It doesn’t care if you live or die, it won’t remember you either way.
This beauty, the kind that exists for the sake of existing, it makes me dizzy.
No 4.
I’m the kind of tired that only comes as consequence of being swallowed by nature and spat out the dark end into the night.
Every bone of mine is yawning.
No 5.
When the sun comes, I say thank you.
When the pain comes, I say thank you.
All I’m trying to do before I die,
Is remember that I am alive.
