Even Kolya couldn't hold the smile for long. He closed his eyes again. When he spoke, his mouth was very dry, his lips sticking together as he tried to form the words.
"It's not the way I pictured it," he told me.
City of Thieves, David Benioff pg. 251
On the flight back into San Francisco, I finished the book Carrie and Blythe had read and that I decided to bring along since I've finished all of mine. It's really incredible how all aspects of your life - even the smallest details you feel to be completely inconsequential - can all come together in a single moment if you know where to look.
There were for multiple reasons a need within me to take this trip. I of course wanted to see Katy and her mother, both of whose company I've really missed over these years, maybe even more than I really wanted to admit to myself. But I also needed the disconnect from all the trouble that's really been building up in my own life: feeling like I've settled for a job that despite its well intentions will forget me in less than a year. Feeling obligated to be strong constantly for Kalena only to grow increasingly upset with her profound lack of positiveness. Not knowing what will ever truly become of love and myself. All of it had been building up in this uncontrollable way. A maelstrom of my own bullshit I've tried for months to ignore or patch up with no success.
And so being in Boulder and finding at least a temporary release from all those things suddenly connected me to this book, in particular this passage, and the idea of going through the motions of every day life only to realize it hasn't been what I've pictured it to be. What that picture is exactly, I also don't know. But I'm aware the image has become skewed, incorrect, off-centered. I have had general ideas in the time since college what I wanted. A brief guideline of the story I wanted to write for myself, but somehow kept throwing myself off the right track.
Perfect symmetry.
Today, for the last few hours in Boulder, we decided to squeeze in one more hike. Up until this point I'd only been capable of light jogs and a moderate incline as I wasn't completely used to the heat or altitude. Katy and Steve had attempted to do the royal arch twice before, but hadn't made it. So up and up we went. What starting as an innocent uphill hike - tiring but nothing I wasn't capable of - soon becoming something much harder. Much, much harder. But up and up we went anyway, hands over feet at some of the more difficult areas. I started to grow frustrated with Katy and Steve who blazed ahead without so much as a second glance back in my direction. Then came and went the native Boulderites in their open-toed sandals, tie-dyed tanks and cut off jeans, hardly out of breath and only glistening mildly from the humidity.
Why was I doing this? A question familiar to me as I ask it often while running and fighting the urge to give up and head home. Sometimes the answer is obvious and shallow: because I want to lose weight and/or keep it off. Other times its because I'm doomed without the release and to push through the pain and manage to catch my breathe will have been worth the peace of mind. I couldn't find an answer for myself here among those impending peaks.
I tried to focus on the sweet smell of moss that instantly transported me to El Yunque and the waterfall hike only to stumble forward into the present, lungs burning from the lack of oxygen. Yet again I was that struggling lump at the end of the line, at the point of not wanting to continue on.
So I didn't. I knew the arch was upon us from the chatter of the hikers coming down smiling and making plans for later that evening. I told Katy and Steve to go ahead, not bothering to look over from my perch on a set of tumbled rocks and recognize the disappointment in their eyes of having come this far only to give up now. I can't tell you how much I wanted to cry at that exact moment. Curse myself for all the "I can'ts" I was letting get in the way.
I was physically and mentally shot. My legs shook, overwhelmed with the lactic acid pouring out my muscles. I could feel a toe on my right foot pounding along to my heartbeat from where I had separated the 4th and 5th digit between a rock, resulting in either a serious sprain or mild break. Not to mention there was the going down bit of this equation. I began to imagine breaking my neck on all the lose gravel beneath now what was surely uneven footing...
"Mariel, you're two switchbacks away from the arch," I heard Katy call from some unseen place overhead. I sat for a moment weighing each outcome carefully. If I continued up to the arch, I would be beyond my breaking point (of course all views such as that one come a high cost. The steepest climb hidden in those two final switchbacks) but would get to reap the benefits of why I'd even climbed the damn mountain to begin with.
Or, I could stay rooted to my rocks waiting out the picture taking while I slapped some life back into my thighs for the now harrowing descent.
A couple in their late 40s passed and nodded gingerly, digging their hiking poles among holes and withering grass. His soft voice cajoling her to finish strong. Almost there, we're almost there.
Fuck it.
I maneuvered around the two, blindly scrambling up the last two switchbacks, past Katy and Steve, hauling myself onto a massive bed rock just below the arch itself. From 7,000 feet, Boulder looked nothing short of epic. The flat irons rising above us like some set of forgotten spears, cold and a shade of unforgiving red in the now late afternoon sun. Its cliche to say at that moment it was worth it. So let me be cliche.
I felt Katy's hand at my shoulder before she settled in beside me. The two of us equally grateful for both our friendship and the view it had provided us.
Within an hour, we were base side. From below the last of the canopy, we watched as a storm rolled in, the smell of freshly dampened grass and gavel as best a finish line as any other. We walked out into the heavy fat drops side by side, faces turned upward in silent rejoice for the unexpected reprieve. And in that moment, walking beside Katy and Steve, I was happy. Uninhabited by pain and purely happy. It had not been the way I had pictured it, but the feeling was endless, bound by a connection to this place and a friendship so immaculate it was hard to believe neither was short of God's doing Himself.
I'm not sure when I'll see Katy again. On the 22nd Steve and she leave for Central America to start the next chapter in their lives together, and I'm positive what will be the most brilliant to date. As for me, the uncertainty continues on in a less majestic or romantic way. Yet it is my own to mold, write, edit and delve into as I please. I must simply always be present to listen for and find those connections. Take them by the hand and walk together out from the covering of the trees and into the clearing where, at last, we can have the sun on our faces, the rain at our backs, and an Earth in which to walk among forever if we wish it.
Regardless of how I picture the outcome, I can be happy again so long as I allow myself to be. I choose to be.
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