You notice the air thinning. Each breath becomes a small act of attention. The ridge line ahead traces a signature against nothing — patient, unhurried, written over millennia by forces that never considered being watched.
Something releases. The need to arrive somewhere dissolves into the walk itself.
The space between peaks holds more than the peaks themselves. You begin to understand distance not as emptiness but as invitation.
Granite remembers what water forgets. Here at the treeline, every surface tells a story of subtraction — wind carving, ice splitting, rain smoothing. What remains is only what was necessary.
You count fifteen stones in the garden below. From where you stand, you can only see fourteen. The invisible fifteenth is the one that matters most.
The surface holds the sky perfectly. Every cloud, every distant ridge, every shifting shade of blue-to-gray appears twice — once above, once below. You cannot tell which is the reflection.
Perhaps neither. Perhaps both are real.