What the Mountain Showed Me

I had been hiking alone for three days when it happened — somewhere above the tree line where the air gets thin and the silence has a texture to it. I stopped to rest and felt, without warning, that I was being looked at. Not watched. Looked at. The way you look at something you made and love. I sat down on a rock and wept for an hour and couldn't have told you why. The sky was perfectly clear. On the way back down I felt lighter than I had in years, as if something I'd been carrying without knowing it had been lifted from me and kept.