Keeping Abeyance at Bay

These footsteps fringe the unseen manacles, make known the fetters between his wrists and ankles, crossed, making an "X" about his waist, moving in intersected unison only when they drop from their meticulous fronts. Lowered through the lumbar, he strains his muscles to escape this shackled barrage of mentally emphatic friction, but with each push sends spittle jaunting to the baking pavement, his lungs plashing with inhaled phlegm, rasping, gnashing, heaving through their tortured use. His sight is limited to the mountain's approaching crest, a view tunneled by the sheer scarcity of function in his eyes - his heart pumping a crude blend of vitriol and the golden-red blood of the mythological gods, making him at once both on the verge of bodily submission and existential triumph.

His quads begin to sear the underside of his skin, making each hair stand up from the simple wish to be left alone, reticent to be burnt out of its solitary stance as the single dominant resident of that unprepossessing follicle. Stricken with a waking form of rigor mortis, every step is a struggle merely to extend and contract, making the same labored shapes a thousand times more difficult; his breathing so spasmodic that he imagines he's inhaling the detrital breath before it has a chance to disperse and become the beautifully oxygenated inhalation that naturally comes next.

And then he's there. All at once the climb has reached its zenith, its paramount ascent akin to the precipitous rock face one sees at what could only be described as the end of the earth, its peak... unlike anything he's ever been so fortunate as to arrive at. The trees form the canopy of what appears to be a tunnel made exclusively for him, extending infinitely into the distance as an expanse of greens and browns, painted so richly that impasto pales in comparison with itself. The light pierces the leaves with such minute vastness that the space not filled with life is lit up in spears of gold... the air has a crispness about it such that each movement of limb is met with the eager reply of a gentle caress, leaving each and every hair on his body standing on end, but from a much different motive than before. As he breathes it in he experiences a feeling of blissful rejuvenation and knows what purpose the grueling climb before had served: to eliminate all traces of bodily contamination in full preparation for the perfection that lay ahead. No impurity deserves the honor sharing the same body with something of this worth...

And as he stands there basking in elation and wonder, something stirs the leaves around him... a swirling that takes place without even the semblance of a wind to inspire it. The atmosphere becomes nearly palpable, and as he feels the massive weight of an interminable aura enveloping his body, he hears in whispers an inaudible resonance, seemingly making its birth from within the trees themselves... yet... unthreateningly so... it is as if this world, this oasis of celestial brilliance, was sounding its gratitude for being given the chance to heal another injured soul...