A wailing torrent of wind and water crashes upon my shoulders. The path below becomes unsteady as water mixes with soil and stone. I feel my feet slipping, my body screaming out in pain as I am pushed down by the storm. I want to stay down, stay on my knees to bandage my hands and feet and rest but I know I can’t stop because if I stop I may never get back up again. Sitting under the rain as it hit my face I wonder why I do this at all if the trail guiding me up the mountain has become is so uneasy and treacherous.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, I am afraid to say that it won’t be the last. This instance though, I have been disabused of the notion that my relationships to this journey, at least for the moment, won’t always be in some sense attempting to placate a higher authority. An authority that, in many ways, does not seek to understand but dictate the journey which I am on. One more satiated by the milestones reached rather than the climb itself. I don’t fault them for that as their progress is invariably tied to these milestones, but I do question the method in which they have sought to pursue them. To weigh me down with stacks of rods and weights and tell me to achieve without giving me much guidance as to what it is that I am attempting to achieve or how I should get there. So then it becomes unsurprising that at some point I will fall short of these goals and ultimately disappoint.

Failure is built into this system as well as paranoia as I attempt to create stability from ambiguity. It makes me realize how much I’m afraid of the lash that has left these scars so saliently on my body. I wonder when they will heal but never give the time or the energy to do. I keep myself just keep far enough ahead so the punishment doesn’t ring against my skin or continue to scar up my heart.

I’ve become afraid. Afraid of words and their delivery as it opens myself up to this unanswerable criticism which is unsustainably lacking of any true solution to the problem it seeks to criticize. I have seen the darkness and the void, the chaos which lies beneath, and attempted to quell it using time and resources but I can only go so far before I am pulled back down the mountain on my hands and knees. I am not afraid of falling, and tripping on this journey but what gives me pause are the instances of being pushed.

It hurts me and I feel it. I don’t know how to describe it and try to deal with the absurdity of it through laughter and prose. In truth, though it hurts every time someone mentions how unfair this all it, the cards that I’ve drawn out of the deck of fate shouldn’t have even been there in the first place. The unavoidableness of this situation makes me want to just wish it all away but there are no easy solutions. Just mud, rocks, wind, and rain to move through as I climb. I know will be stronger by the end but I pray that I won’t lose too much to the pain before I can get there.