Dream of Me

November 5

"Shit," I thought to myself as a giant chunk of ice fell only inches from my face and descended to the bottom of the frozen giant. My partner was climbing above me and being very careless, clearly, about keeping my person in tact and secured to the mountain side.

"Watch it!" I yelled up to him, or her, I still couldn't quite tell after so many nights. His, or her, face was always a little bit out of focus, even surrounded by an enormous parka and almost always wearing goggles that reminded me of a housefly under a microscope.

"Sorry," the blur partner slightly turned the blur neck to shout back down at me, "The ice is getting unstable up here."

I had never known much about mountain climbing, and was infinitely confused as to why I was here and why I had put myself into this situation, even if it was subconscious. We were about ten minutes from the summit, or at least one of them, and I was so high off the ground that the fog consumed it and if I had to describe the environment around me, I would say it was a giant, frozen version of heaven. I had watched a Game of Thrones episode a few months earlier, and this experience seemed quite similar to Jon's ascension of the Wall. Only this was a mountain, and it was real. My fingers were numb, the hairs in my nose were grabbing at each other and freezing on contact despite the layers of fabric I had wrapped around my entire face. I just appeared here this time, there was no warning or crash course in how to successfully survive climbing a wall of ice. A few days ago, my partner and I had been camping at the base of the mountain, just spending time in nature and talking to people that passed on their way to climb. The ground was sparsely scattered with pies of snow and sections of ice with prickly, dead foliage poking out of the covering. Our tent was much bigger than possible, but sometimes these situations didn't make sense and sometimes I couldn't remember specific details the next day anyway.

"How much further?" I screamed over the wind and ice sound up to my phantom of a companion.

"Almost there," he/she replied. Whenever she/he spoke, it somehow transcended the elements and distractions and arrived in my ears clearly and particularly. The voice sounded familiar, but I was sure I had not met this person before our adventures had begun. We continued in silence, sweating inside the huge, supposedly cold-proof garments, but it still felt that the frigidness was infecting my insides in the form of tiny needles of injection. Finally, we reached the top, and at once the wind stopped, somehow, and a kind of plateau of pure snow lay for what appeared to be miles.

"Okay... now what?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Why did we come up here in the first place?"

"It was your idea."

"How was it my idea? I didn't even know we were doing this until halfway up! This entire world is fucked. Where are the people that passed us days ago? Is no one else climbing this? And why? What's the point? I don't need to prove my masculinity by nearly killing myself. I would be perfectly fine staying on horizontal ground. This was not my idea, so why don't you tell me what's really going on?"

"I don't know." The phantom stared at me, and I couldn't, still, make out the features.

"Who are you? At least tell me that."

"I'm not sure. I'm just here. To be with you. That's what I think I'm supposed to do. Keep you safe."

"Safe from what? You didn't do a great job of that when you almost decapitated me with a chunk of ice."