The Scales of Mountains

The scarves fourteen-year-old you tried on in Claires were the pressings into high school collapse. For you, shields were necessary for mere comfort of gaze (and being gazed upon). Later, hoodies took over, when fashion, just like bright lights, music, and mobs of strangers, sent your heart into a whirlwind. A single word defined this time, defined you, like new fainting spells in band class and sleeping according to vampires.

Shields of silence took you over. The shyness from preschool came back, its silkiness awash in bright summer hues and laid directly under your chin. Yet your mind was never whispering, muttering, swallowing back. Mostly, it was a primal rabbit at the mercy of hiding places and zig zag breaths.

Teachers were foxes, though you’d have disagreed back then, even when they had you in their jaws and your heart thumped piteously against their teeth. Your own teeth clenched too, though without clenching, and pulsed just the same, a constant reminder of fear unmarked. Victim to all, predator to your own flesh.

What is fear when it’s impossible to see, when it’s not real? A mountain peak without verticality, a base beheaded and laid forgotten to its cliffs, the only witness. Your mountain was always the future, disappearing into the clouds, never sure of its head. Its knees would knock together, elbows hitting edges as it stumbled onwards anyway.

The only thing real about it [and what is fear?]: Pain. Emaciated, wan, and gray. Sleep eluded you.

Night owl you became, though you hunted the fear by pushing it away, far into the dark of night, and imagined yourself chasing versions of you down the street until you understood. Pink, yellow, and clear like diamond, you shone brightly in the 3am stillness, demanding from yourself, yourself, and all that you could be.

Stars were more like waystones on nights like that. A page in a storybook, the girl holding her knees by the window and staring at the sky.

***

In a time capsule opened further into the future than here, only ten years later, you see all of this as more than an early-life breakdown or some mysterious emotional health meltdown. You see it as wish-fulfillment, the melting of a caterpillar into soup, and crystalline restructuring into wings. A wish so deep, the wellspring purified and made it shiny, keeping it until the sun was no longer an enemy to sleep.

You and your mom talk sometimes about brain maturation like it’s fine wine, though it tastes more like mead these days. How in just a single year, Sisyphusian trials shrunk down to afterthoughts. Your eyes, even, see more than just reality, more than lights and shadows and shapes, but patterns across time. You’ve become every color that once were scattered in the dark and racing toward answers. Like bunny trails, your soul took on a single ray, divided it, then reclaimed it through the earth and wind, a full body.

Stars that once were waystones, markers on your journey to a you who transcended plateaus and fell in love with mountain peaks, fell away from your eyes like scales shedding.

Welcome, light, you think. I’ve missed your brilliance.

A/N: Thank you for reading! This was written for Hannah Moore's challenge.