I stepped off my bed within the tall fire tower. A book that had fallen on my chest during an afternoon nap clattered against aged planks, causing dust to filter through rays of sun. I walked slowly to the door. I did not haste. The sights would either be there or not, and whether it be or not, there was always tomorrow.
Breathtaking was a paltry way to describe the view. It was centering, calming, freeing. Worry was a singular tree in the vast openness before me.
A wide valley sloped down and away from me for miles. Towards the setting sun, there were two altering mountain ranges, switching zenith’s against the dark milky blue sky. A tunnel-like valley formed between them, and at the end was a hazed snow capped peak, the tallest in all directions. Behind it the sun set, casting a celestial shadow towards the fire tower, illuminating the straddling mountain ranges in molten light, but shadowing the valley leading to it.
To your left and right people may have the sun shining on them, and you may be within a shadow watching those to your sides. After all these years, I can tell you the sun always rises. You will be warm again. We are all based on the circumstance of the moment, the valley lies in darkness due to a mountain that has always been there. The trees in that valley didn’t choose to live there, but the mountain also had no part in rising in a place that would shadow others.
The wind hit my face, a cold breeze in the warm night. It was rich, potent, smelling of the incoming winter, an eternal cycle’s turn.
I recall back with self idolization to a moment in my past. Not long enough ago to be childhood, but close enough to be tainted with the “reality” that acts of more of a restricting chain than death. A colleague of mine held some knowledge about someone else in our office, and shared it with me as though it would bring us closer. That person would frequent my office with the word, “Drama”, and countless “Did you hear’s. For a while, my entire life so far at that point, I had gone along with this crusade of society. I smiled when told things about people, rarely joined in the revelry, and tried to convince everyone that I thought similar to them. I would nod and smile with mirthless eyes. I always wondered if I was the only one who could see that in someone. If there was someone who could see the falseness behind my gaze. Aside from my own reflection.
In this regard I was always the most alone. Until I found the fire tower. Hundreds of miles of…the human nature is to say “nothing”, yet what this “nothing” is referring to is simply land in which we have not poisoned. What was nothing before us? If “something” means to be comprised of the human touch, then what about the time spent without us? No, I was surrounded by hundreds of miles of “everything”, a rare place where we can breathe in the world as we were made to do so. In this place the “nothing” is those words. Those “Did you hear’s”.
In my first months at the fire tower, I hated myself for this…this singular podium I had created with only my name etched. I thought myself wise for seeing that the ones who detected what was “nothing” are truly the nothing. I thought myself a god, a herald of wisdom. A herald who shared this wisdom with only himself, was soon what I learned. I had not been gifted, but burdened. I then began to not hate others, but myself. I wished I could live like the rest, a blissful ignorant life full of the downfall of others. I cried to leave the tower, but there was “something” keeping me here. Years later my beard is as long as my day. Hours pass like mountains, and years like pebbles.
That “something” about the firetower that always made me stay had no description. Breathtaking is a paltry explanation. This view is…everything.
