Mount Olympus

I hear dust devils echoing with antediluvian tales. I feel sandy stings of wispy winds carrying to my wind-blown face caveats left over from distant epochs.

They sound desperate; they smell of rust.

Deimos and Phobos hide the stars they pass under, as eclipsing snowballs across a dark turquoise sky. The temperatures fall.

My blood curdles.

Mars is nowhere any reasonable man would go. There are no rains upon Tharsis; nothing falls onto the plains of the Shield except oxides. Wild quasidimensional xenobeasts cry out in the night as they grow cold, longing for sunrise and something to eat. Crying out, hopefully, not for me.

I know why they cry; I, too, long for sunrise. And something to eat. Or a chance to reverse a bad decision.

I know I must do what's right, as sure as Kilimanjaro on Earth rises--like Olympus does on Mars, above the Tharsis Shield. I seek to quell the fright that's deep inside, appease the cowering beast I remain, what I am, that took me away from you--something even unreasoable men would never do.

I curse the arid ironscape. The ferric reminders of moisture forever bound to atomized metals blowing through me. I miss the rains that never come.

Rain. That would be Redemption. That would be human.

Olympus Mons calls, its sheer dormancy an anxious statement--and a monument to the absurd. Disproportionate to this world, it tilts Mars unnaturally.

Thus, I must take some time to do a thing. Something a million men would never do.

Mars taunts me: Hurry boy! Sessile Olympus is waiting there for you — its towering an erection of lust for a wasted life.

If I can't have Earth, I can't have anything on Earth: I cannot have you.

Imagine the catharsis, throwing oneself off the highest mountain in the solar system. After all, I threw myself off of Earth to get to Mars, did I not?

History travels at the speed of light; reality, even faster. Will she sense my death three minutes later? From the time I rejoin the heavens?

This particular heavenly body, closer to me now than Earth will ever be, serves for where I aim myself.

Jump again, coward, jump!