Halfway up the rocky face – and by the time I saw that creeping giant it was too late, there was nowhere I could go. A climber held captive by a cloud.
It’s strange, to feel at once so smothered, and yet so free, back exposed to the open sky. I shifted warily in my toeholds, fingers hugging wind-weathered rock, as the white wall enveloped the trees, erased the house-speckled valley below, left me adrift in an eerie bright blindness, everywhere I look.
Clouds are not happy little slices of heaven; they aren’t warm or soft or fluffy as they appear, lazing across the sky. Clouds are cold wet nature, isolating fogs. And as the driplets accumulated, and the wall grew slick, I struggled, caught myself once, twice, as my feet slipped from their toeholds. I hugged the mountain for life, prayed in small uttered curses, but the granite only cried back in return, cold tears borrowed from the cloud. And my hand slipped off the rocky face, and the air whistled around me,
and all I saw was white, white, white.