The Mountain Doesn't Care

The mountain doesn't care that you're climbing it. It was here before your species learned to walk upright. It will be here after your species forgets how. You think you're conquering it. You're not. You're visiting. The mountain is letting you use its body as a staircase, and it can take that back with one avalanche, one rockslide, one afternoon of weather it didn't bother to warn you about. And yet you climb. Because something in you needs to stand where the air gets thin and the world gets wide and you can finally see how small everything is— including you, especially you— and that smallness feels like freedom. The mountain teaches you what the city forgot: that silence has a sound. It sounds like wind and your own breathing and the absence of every voice that ever told you what to do. At the summit— if you reach it— there is nothing. No prize. No sign. Just more sky than you've ever seen and the sudden, humbling understanding that the mountain didn't need you to see it. You needed the mountain to see yourself. So you come back down. Changed. Quieter. With dirt under your nails and something under your ribs that wasn't there yesterday.