/lit/ - Literature

>>14235430
(3/5)

Healing takes time, and hiking takes time too. At some points I allowed myself to make small progresses, strides as tiny as an inch towards the top of Flint Rock, with it’s broad flat face staring down at me. As I made my way up the slope and everything burned, I remembered to the time in my life when everything was ending, when the most I could do was get up off the couch and balance my way with hands on the wall to the kitchen counter. I remembered getting to the counter, and when eating a piece of toast and not rejecting it was a small victory. Eventually, shambles to the kitchen counter turned into being able to slow hobbles to the end of the driveway. Making it to the end of the driveway turned into several driveway lengths, and then it was down to the end of the street. Slowly, but surely, I eventually made it to the end of the neighborhood as the benzodiazepines lost their hold on me, and I began to reclaim ownership over my body. Neighborhoods turned into blocks, into jogs, runs, and hikes, and now, Flint Rock. 1,300 feet from car to crest.
As I climbed the mountain, I realized that I had been on this slope since I was eight years old, since I had been put there by well-meaning parents who wanted the best for their mentally-ill child, and the sociopathic care providers who wanted to know more about the human brain. I’d been in that pit of strangling oak and burning gravel, of thorns and snakes unseen, my entire life. There was no trail, not in my life or on this great hill, and it was up to me to find the right way. Halfway up the slope, I paused a moment to rest, to relieve the weight of the pack, and took a drink of water. I sat on a stony outcropping and looked outward. Above the sea of scrub, the pale yellow rabbit brush, gamble, and sage, great charred husks stood like sentinels watching over the mountain. They glittered in the descending light, still shiny from the energy that made them this way.
In the town of Mancos CO in early 2012, there had been a forest fire. Great swathes of Ponderosa had been killed in the blaze, caused by a nearby train dragging chains over the tracks. My boss had told me that. It swept over the hills and down into the canyon, almost burning down the town. Here in this land, these great black totems, twisted in their deaths were surrounded by life. The world dies, and the world heals. People die, and they heal. Young things are strong because they are flexible and green, and able to come back again. Their softness and tenderness gives them flexibility, and they are capable of change. Around one of the charred mass in front of me, a vine crept its way up, all soft and green. Set against the rainbow gradient of the setting sun I found comfort in all this. Things do get better.