Ed turned from his computer and told me that I could conquer mountains, that I could conquer the world. That ten years from now the likes of Donald Trump and Queen Elizabeth will be asking for my audience. And if only he had someone telling him twenty, thirty years ago what he was telling me now...
He said that two years ago his wife divorced him, and he gave her everything. Fourteen million dollars worth, coming from six patents to his name and four PhDs, and he gave it all to her. He told me that he does not regret it a bit, and that he knew that I would do the same. He could see it in my eyes and could tell by my face. I did not respond, but I think I knew my answer. After they divorced, he started having strokes. Now he has cancer, he said, and next week at the doctor he will find out whether he lives or dies.
It is a flattening sense to feel the world change around you and tell you that you may no longer live as the person you had been. That you have to somehow relearn yourself to fit the contorted shape that those around you are giving. The way that you breathe your air is made obsolete, and every word you use it for is elegiac. I left thinking about that next mountain, and supposing it to be unclimbable. Caged as a man who is told that he now lives only in anecdotes and stories, because your whole being, your breathing body's thoughts, have a status that is not situated anywhere else now but within those tellings. A sudden past, since their location no longer exists for you to live in, and since the present one demands of you a new way to walk. What is a person's location, then, when they walk through days though they know nothing of the path of their upward steps.
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