rainier The highest point in Washington sat in the window and taunted her, drew her in. There in a one-bedroom most of her life was spent idly, meandering through a dull and choking mass of channels and websites. Always there, the vibrant and humming beauty, the symphony of humanity in Seattle; always ignored as it drifted hazily through air and open windows, rejected and despised. Her face, when alone, kept still and muted, washed in back-lit blue with those faint twitches, the indiscernible tightness and grimace of resigned apathy with a psychiatrically-repressed edge. Still she did her hair up nice in the morning, bustled between full tables, made most of her money on tips addressed to "that sweetheart waitress". The acting ate at her. After work she walked home under waning daylight, growing fainter until the streetlights lit up all in sequence. The scene, rows of tall pinpoints coming to life over a comfortable urban landscape, possessed an elusive fragment of that childhood wonder found in city nights, the soft blanket of orange-ish illumination and a sky of undulating gray, the safety of having a parent in arm's reach, being guided through a lovely cushioned spectacle. That feeling sat in a corner of her chest and begged to be embraced, screamed to her, but it lay just out of reach and the hurt, the loss of such an integral and meaningful experience tore at her mind, summoned regret and a biting frustration. Something was lost, something broken. In bed that night her mind flitted through all the day's events, filing away the awkward gestures and the frustrations and soreness, everything that bit at her heels in those streetlit walks. The blankets of the bed rose in messy plumage around her, squeezed between her arms and taken off of the mattress corners. The bedroom door shut flush with the wall, the same shade of gray in the darkness, with the doorframe's lined texture as the only distinction. Curtains fell along the walls and, through their gaps, permitted that faint urban glow. Through the south-facing window, though, something surreal illumined. Three hours after first setting into bed, her eyes still wouldn't close. A ghostly outline of Mt. Rainier flickered in the window, flickered as if poorly drawn and animated, coming in and out of reality with every flash, illuminated by something completely removed from the world. The lights made no shadows, only serving to burn the mountain's image into her red-ringed eyes, wide, as if they were forced open. Wide, watching a light that wasn't there. Over the next month the imprint of the mountain never left her vision, and the lights never stopped flickering. The circles around her eyes grew deeper, her hair more frazzled and her nerves frayed. Every day was a strain, every walk back home torture, and the pull at her chest away from life grew insurmountable. Four weeks after that first night of visions, she filled a backpack and set off southward through the night. - - - Suburbia came to a close after two days of walking along highways. Every part of her appeared disheveled and slept-in. Her eyes, gray, haunted, they never pointed anywhere but towards that monolith on the horizon, the rough angular lines of the mountain which now spread further into the sky. When obscured by buildings, or hills, or trees, it still sent gashes of white light above the horizon, cutting haphazard lines like a panicked scraping. The sky seemed infected, slashed and bleeding light, all originating from that mountain, its glare, the panicked simplicity of its form and the flashing of its otherworldly glow. The world pulsed a low light and the headlights rushing by struck her face harshly, her cheekbones thrusting out of her face, defining the starved desperation in the lines of her skin. - - - Into the forest now. Climbing up Route 165 and the entire world shook purple and white. Her senses attacked by the throbbing, all she could do was press onward. The soles of her shoes were worn down and the laces frayed and her hair whipped her face in the early wintertime winds. Snow fell all through the fourth night and as it covered the ground in white every piece of her vision seemed made out of coarsely-drawn lines. It attacked, grabbing at her feet, shaking her from side to side. In the throbbing light of the mountain every part of her face was gripped with intensity. The mountain took up the entire sky. - - - Mowich Lake in the foothills was a pool black as night behind her as she sat atop a ridge and gazed at the mountain which had called to her so strongly, it was all there was now, and nothing to do but go forward along these violent ridges, the ground was immaterial, black and glossy like a world made out of obsidian and glass, the sky was nothing, nothing at all but the mountain. The mountain was all that there was. - - - Up the slopes with frozen bleeding feet and hands and torn clothes and matted hair and none of it mattered, none of it felt, nothing could possibly compete with the sensation of infinite flashing light and rays that penetrated everything about the world, sharp totality. The mountain was everything. - - - Dead on the slopes, the last thing she saw was the mountain's peak reaching up past the bounds of the sky.