Mountain Qualia

NaNoWriMo Day 14

Joakim woke up with Julian pulling on his shirt. "Tipi, Tipi, wake up!"

It was chilly, but the sun was up already. Every muscle ached and showed it remembered the previous days all too well. There was no Kalisa around. "You saw her too, didn't you?" Joakim said.

"Who? The woman? Of course."

Joakim was not sure if that was a comforting answer or not. Horrible events and thoughts in the evening and night have a way of becoming laughable when the sun shines on it the next morning. But there are also the less envious situations, such as when you wake up in the morning and enter your living room, where there was the dark empty floor, there is now an enormous spider waiting there to surprise you in the full daylight.

"Call me Joakim from now on. How are you feeling?"

"Fine," Julian answered. "I have to go."

"We go together, Julian, I'm not letting you go off alone again and do something crazy like you did yesterday."

"I mean, I really have to go." Julian hopped from one foot to the other and held his hands on his behind.

Joakim rubbed his eyes. "Go behind that tree. Here, use these as toilet paper." Joakim handed Julian a handful of leaves he had been using as a makeshift mattress. While Julian was relieving himself, Joakim packed his things and return the cave entrance to how it had been before their arrival. This meant scattering the mattress leaves, kicking sand around to cover up the places they had been walking on and disperse of the ashes of the campfire.

The heat of the fire had killed the soil and everything in it. Joakim could not restore life there, he regretted. But he did his best considering the circumstances.

When Julian returned, Joakim laid out the plan. He left out all the madness in his explanation and reasoning. They would head up the mountain in the most direct way possible. Going down was another option, but from here there would be only one peak nearby and it would have plenty of people gathering. There would be so many places to end up if they went downhill, and there was no telling if it would be near a town or some place where he could safely leave Julian behind. So up it was. They would find the nearest sign to lead them there and then take a cable car down. That was the only contingency. Not having a simple way of transportation down would be a downer.

Joakim and Julian shared the last lunch with the now rather stale sandwich and then they went forward. The morning air felt good and cleared up a lot of messiness. He would return to the civilized world, where he would get himself checked out at a hospital and find out how to get back to normal life. Who does that by walking around aimlessly between rocks, pines and meadows?

Even Julian seemed to have found back his cheerfulness. "The mind does weird things to us in darkness, don't they?" he said to Julian.

"Are these acorns or hazelnuts?" Julian said holding up some kind of nut.

"I think they're neither." Joakim sometimes forgot he was talking to a young lad. Sometimes he thought Julian had cracked the mysteries of life in his head, or at least was attempting to. But at other times, these concepts seemed to fly right over his head.

It did not take long before they found a larger path leading them up and there they saw the sign they were hoping for. It showed the name Morgensternspitze and was accompanied by the symbols of a restaurant, a cable car and a doable distance: two point eight kilometers.

"It's still a bit of a hike, Julian, but we're finally having a clear and attainable goal." They held hands going up the path. The trees became more sparse than the thick pine forests that they had been walking in yesterday.