At Altitude

The cold presses against my skin like a secret I've kept too long. And I wonder, standing here at the edge of where the water dissolves into cloud, whether this is what it feels like to be unmade. Not violently. Not with any cruelty. Just... gradually absorbed into something vaster than oneself.

The wind catches my hair and I let it. There's no one to see, no one to perform composure for. Only the lake, and the mist that rises from it like breath from the mouth of something ancient and indifferent and oddly kind.

Lake Lucerne. Even the name sounds like a spell, doesn't it? Lucerne. Light-bearer. Though there's precious little light now. Just this blue hour, this in-between colour that isn't quite dusk and isn't quite anything else. The mountains have vanished entirely. Swallowed. I rather envy them.

I came here to feel small, I think. Or perhaps to feel at all, which has been rather more difficult lately than I'd care to admit. The numbness that accumulates like silt in the everyday. Meetings and meals and the mechanical business of being a person. It loosens here, at altitude, in the presence of water that has existed for millennia without once asking what am I for?

My mother would say I'm being dramatic. She'd be right, of course. She usually is.

But there's something honest about drama when you're alone with it. When no one is watching you feel things. The wind pulls strands across my face and I don't brush them away. Let them stay. Let something wild touch me.

Somewhere behind this veil of grey, there are Alps. Impossible, ridiculous Alps. And I am merely here. Small and temporary and rather cold, if I'm honest. And somehow that's the first comforting thought I've had in weeks.