She drove until the asphalt became gravel, then until the gravel became dirt, then until the dirt became nothing at all.

The car sat at the trailhead with its engine ticking in the cold. Above, the mountain was a shadow against a sky the color of a bruise fading to yellow at the edges. She had come here expecting resolution -- the kind of ending that travel promises but never delivers. The trail went up. She went up. The ending stayed exactly where it always was: somewhere ahead, somewhere behind, nowhere in particular.

The fluorescent lights made everything look like a memory of itself.

At two in the morning, the parking lot was a lake of sodium-vapor light bordered by darkness on all sides. Inside, the shelves held their products with the patience of museum displays. He bought coffee and a map. The map showed roads but not reasons. The coffee was hot enough to remind him that the present tense still existed.

The water was too still. Stillness that complete felt like an accusation.

The lake sat in its valley like a held breath. No wind, no current, no ripple. The mountains reflected in it perfectly, which meant the reflection was just as cold, just as indifferent, just as unable to offer the warmth she had climbed all this way to find. She threw a stone. The ripples lasted eleven seconds. Then the silence came back.

Dear everyone I have ever disappointed: the view from here is extraordinary.

He sat on the summit with a notebook balanced on his knee and a pen that the altitude made reluctant. Every letter started with an apology and ended with a description of the sky. None of them reached a conclusion. The wind took the pages one by one, which was, he supposed, a form of delivery.

A home is just a place where your absence is noticed. This was not a home.

The cabin had been empty for seasons you could count by the layers of pine needles on the porch. She opened the door and the air inside was colder than the air outside, which should have been impossible but wasn't. The stove worked. The matches worked. The fire, when it came, illuminated nothing that needed to be seen.

Going down is not going back. The mountain knows this even if you don't.

The trail down used different muscles, showed different views, told a different story. Everything he had seen on the way up appeared now in reverse, which changed its meaning entirely. The same trees, the same stones, the same sky -- but from here, they were all postscripts to something that had already happened and could never happen again.