From Atop Such A Precipice (An Excerpt)

 

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “But, I knew you would come anyway. I knew you would stay. You’re different, Suzie, from all the rest of them. One day, maybe you will go up, too, beyond the precipice. I hope you do. I think I would like to see you again. One day.”

She looked away and down at the ground, and hoped for everything in her that her face did not betray the emotions swelling up within. She could not bear to look at him anymore. She could not bear it to think he might be right, to think that there could be more than this valley––her home. She could not bear to look at him and see more than just a ruddy faced boy talking nonsense and of terrible visions, things that just might be, might always have been.

“I’ve got to start climbing now, Suzie. I need you to stand here and watch until I make it over. I have a few hours of light just yet. I should make it to the precipice before nightfall, and then you can go back to them. You can tell them all that you’ve seen, all that you’ve learned. You can stand here and watch and know that I’ll be just fine.”

He clasped her hand tight in his and then let it go, letting it drop to her side. He turned and started walking up the mountain.

“Frederick.”

At hearing his name, he stopped. He turned and looked at her. He saw her.

“Frederick, what do you see? When you look at me? What do you see?”

His head moved up and down slightly as the rest of him stood still as the mountain itself, fixed fast in place. His lips loosened as his eyes unfocused just for a moment and gazed much farther beyond her. He blinked and squinted his eyes. With the intake of a long deep breath––a breath taken before embarking on a grand endeavor, to prepare the heart, the soul, and the mind, to summon the courage to step out of the shadows and beyond the fear––he looked at Suzie and smiled wide.

“I see,” he said. He breathed out, a slight laugh escaping with the last of the air. “… absolutely everything. The whole of everything, wrapped up in brightness and bigness, warmth and excitement. Suzie, I see life itself and all its wonderful possibilities. Suzie, I see you, and you are more wonderful than you could ever imagine.”

He nodded and laughed. A smile took over his face and transformed his features. He was Frederick, and to her, right then, he was something more––something beautiful, something grand. He turned and started to move again in the direction of the precipice.

“Frederick,” the soft voice came up again after him. He stopped and turned. “I’ve never seen anything… not like that.”

“Keep looking,” he said. “You will. Eventually, if you don’t stop trying to see, you will see. You will see what’s always been there.”

Neither of them said anymore, letting the gentle breeze whistling between speak for both the unspoken feelings hidden within. He breathed in deeply once more and turned one last time. Forward he continued, and in doing, finally began what he never before could because he always had supposed he never should.

She stood behind and watched him for what felt like hours. He had been just like her when he had begun, but after awhile he seemed to be more of the mountain than of anything like herself. He became more of the wild, moving away into the distance, than anything of the valley, than anything she had ever known. Eventually, she lost him amongst the outcroppings and the veins of dark stone rising with the slopes. He became a movement of the mountain itself. He had pressed at the edges, and the edges had taken him in.

She yet remained, even as the air around her began to chill as it prepared for the onset of night, and kept her eyes fixed on the precipice and the light streaming over the summit. It was there that she saw him arise once more from out of the rock of the mountain. There he climbed up, a silhouette against the fading light beyond––a new being, separate from the valley, divided from the mountain, something all his own.

From atop the mountain, Frederick––without looking back to the valley, to Suzie––made the last step to the edge of the precipice. From such a vantage, he looked beyond. There he saw. There he found. There he discovered.

“Never would I have thought. Now that is, I suppose, quite something for certain,” he said. Letting himself free from the constraints of the ground upon which he had always seemed content to stand, he stepped forward. There, finally, once and for all, he chose no more to be any longer what he once always was.