The View

You have not spoken since we began the climb, though neither have I. Still, our silences are not the same.

Yours is a silence devoured, pulled inward, swallowed whole by the little black box in your hand. That dark mirror world, always buzzing, always demanding. It holds you hostage. You walk half-present, glancing up only to keep from stumbling. Whatever world you’re in, it is not this one.

My silence is of another kind. It blooms outward, nebulous and listening. It gathers the thousand voices around me. The forest inhaling and exhaling, the laughter of water rushing unseen, the secretive chatter of wings in the trees. The world speaks, and I long to join the conversation.

You came because I asked, because habit tugged you along. I always hope the journey will catch you, the way it catches me. Yet it feels, more often than not, like dragging a weary child through errands. Your body present, your spirit elsewhere, waiting only for it to end.

So this time I chose a mountain with a promise: a view so vast, so holy, I cannot imagine anyone arriving at its summit and wishing themselves elsewhere.

The forest, after all, is a cathedral. It humbles. It asks of you smallness, asks you to bow before trees older than memory, taller than longing. It asks for patience, so that the shy creatures of leaf and shadow will not flee at your heavy step. It asks for reverence. To place each foot with care, to remember that life moves slowly and softly beneath the scattered leaves.

If you listen, you may hear the birds exchanging secrets. Do they sing in one shared tongue? Is each note we hear as beauty perhaps, for them, a warning? And if so, are you the danger? Am I?

I know not to speak to you when you vanish into that other world. To talk then is to address a ghost, one who does not recognize their own body, their own place on the earth. So I walk ahead, waiting for you to follow, and I wonder. When the last page of your life is turned, will you regret the hours poured into that glowing screen that clings to your hand like a shadow?

At last, the trees part. We break into sky. The air thins and my lungs burn with sweetness. Wind cools my skin, presses kisses of salt and sweat on my brow. I kneel, humbled by the vastness. The world unfurls below, gilded by a sun that has never been more generous. Clouds wander, slow and certain, unconcerned with all that troubles us. The golden light spills like divinity itself across ridges and valleys. No wonder people, standing in such radiance, believe in gods.

I turn to you, aching to share it. But you are seated on a rock, bowed again to your small black shrine. Fingers drumming, eyes consumed. I call you. You rise reluctantly, as though dragged to the altar of this view. And still — no wonder. No awe.

Instead, you lift the box. You frame yourself against the horizon, reducing this cathedral of sky and stone to a backdrop. A prop. Then, satisfied, you return to your rock, ready to leave.

You did not look.

Did not feel the wind blessing your cheek, nor taste the sweetness the trees released for us.

You did not hear the wild conversations of wings, the earth whispering beneath your steps.

You did not belong to this moment.

I ask why you came. You shrug.

For a flicker, I imagine seizing the black box and hurling it into the ravine where wind has carved stone for centuries. I imagine you stripped of distraction, forced at last to see: the world, me, yourself. Would you wake then? Would you recognize what it means to be alive?

Instead, I tell you to go on ahead. You do. And suddenly, I am alone at the crown of the mountain.

I breathe. You look so much better from far away.