The Breath of Stone

The air at high altitude tastes of nothing—it is thin, sharp, and metallic, like licking a cold iron railing in the dead of winter. It strips the tongue of flavor and leaves the lungs feeling raw, as if you have swallowed a handful of dry, crushed stars. There is a specific silence that lives in places where the earth pushes upward to scrape the belly of the sky; it is not an absence of sound, but a heavy, pressurized hum that vibrates against the collarbone. My skin remembers the feeling of standing near something so vast that it makes my own heartbeat feel like an intrusion. It is the sensation of being small, not in a way that diminishes, but in a way that settles the marrow. When the world is stripped of its soft edges, what remains of us? Does the body hold the memory of the mountain’s cold, or does the mountain simply wait for us to stop shivering?

Imran Dawood has captured this stillness in his image titled The Naked Mountain. The way the light clings to the rock feels like a long-held breath finally released. Can you feel the chill of that altitude in your own chest?