We're on the top of a bare mountain, overlooking an abyss. Far below, I see the river, thin as a needle, and the high-mountain pond. We laugh, satisfied to have finally reached the top; it seemed impossible. We relax, leaving our backpacks on the ground. The person I love, the one who encouraged me to do the hike, walks contentedly along the rock face, finds a place to sit at the edge of the precipice and contemplate the landscape, looks at me smiling, moves back a little perhaps so I can take a picture, bends down to sit me on the rock, and the rock is dampened as it slopes down to the abyss. It's instantaneous, it disappears, and only a word of surprise and devastation remains in the air, and consciousness ignites this word from the first syllable to the final neutral vowel: shit.
I've had this nightmare for days now. The word is stuck in my head like an echo trapped inside my skull, the echo of this word in the voice of the person I love as he falls, terrified, toward death. A word like a train that passes and passes again inside me, saturating my flesh and bones, that word that embodies the fall and the helplessness of not being able to do anything. Why did I put my foot there? Why did I leave him? Why did I have to climb this mountain? The irresponsibility of letting chance catch him off guard. If only I had put my foot one centimeter higher, he wouldn't have slipped. He still had a second to grab the rock, he didn't know how to take advantage of it, and now it's too late. He wasted that second looking at me to tell me of his surprise, perhaps even the amusement, that he slipped.
Words speak volumes about what she has just lost. We had a well-deserved dinner planned for last night; the table was set. If only it were just the dinner she's going to miss... But it's the rest of her life, her most cherished goals, the small ones, the big ones, the most exciting ones, and the most secret ones. It was yesterday, the last supper. If only she had known... She leaves behind children; she will never see her grandchildren again; they will never know who they came from or what she wanted for them. All that will remain is the apprehension, the terror the family will now feel toward mountaineering.
His life and what little he has left is concentrated on that word of disappointment, all the sufferings of each day, like an exhausting staircase until reaching that word and nothing more, the disappointment as he sinks into the void, towards the terror of the fall, and an infinity of reservations, one of them being that I have suffered as his evil, he tells me.
