The Third Way

There were three ways to die up here, and I had already used one of them.

First was gravity. You fall, you hit rock, you break. Simple arithmetic. Second was hypothermia. You wait too long in a pocket, your blood slows down, and you sleep until your heart forgets the rhythm. Also simple, just slower. The third was loneliness. That was the one I hadn’t counted on at twenty-five, but at forty-five, it felt like a valid cause of death. It wasn’t the empty space; it was the silence inside your own head when you realized you were the only one who remembered how the rope felt in your hands.

I adjusted the carabiner on my harness, feeling the cold bite through my fleece. The wind was already a living thing out there, shaking the granite face like a dog trying to dry itself. Below me, six hundred meters of nothing, and above, a sliver of sky the color of bruised iron.