How Nice it Must Be

Mount Everest is littered with dead bodies. Climbers who succumbed to the elements. Crack faced porcelain dolls. One armed mannequins. That big ol' hill is a gigantic cryocompressor, freezing bodies and brains and people who, I am quite convinced, will one day thaw out and return to their everyday lives. Things for them will be different in the future. Better. Or not worse, at least. How could they be worse? They will wake up one day and ride the melting icecaps down to the bottom of the mountain. They will get into their cars. They will go home and ask their families what is happening on "Friends." Their families will hug them and tell them it is okay that their faces are kind of smashed up and that they only have one arm. They will be happy and loved and they will go to work and chat about how nice it is to be alive.

I envy that.

I'm frozen, too, wedged between rock shards, halfway up a particularly challenging alpine couloir. But I'm not ever going to thaw out. I don't want to. If anything I want to freeze harder. Feel less. Let the mountaineers climb over me. Let them shatter my head with their ice axes. Let them remark about how courageous I was to make it this far. How sad it is that I am dead. Let them come back for me on a future expedition, wrap my body in an Australian flag, say a prayer, and dump me into a mountain bowl on top of all those other climbers who don't want to thaw out.

Then let more bodies fall on top of me. My future the same as my present as my past. Concealed and frozen. Never really knowing how nice it must be to be alive.