That thin air

Follow my steps through the desolate mountains, in search of that purity, that generous beauty that is the high altitude

There is a place where words have no weight, where breaths must be felt and where one minute can be transformed into a whole year.  I tell you this and I hope you have the same endurance skills as me, because without them you go back on your battered steps, and with a footprint in your stomach that weighs and sinks day after day.
The instinct to venture out is about him that you have to worry about. Taking on even the adventure alone requires leaving your loved ones with mental laziness, turning their efforts towards a flood of personal intentions that will only spur you. Imagine you have two mechanical legs asking for fuel to burn and you will only be able to give it complaints and todain to dispose of. Rest assured that at the summit you will be rewarded, but it will only be a brief moment. The only one you will enjoy fully after a long push to your spirit and the desire to get to the top, you will be at the height of an end that will make you forever alienate from what you know, or that you consider indispensable.

I walked as far as it was necessary to start climbing and sketching deformed lines resembling narrow stradines with curved back and leaning to the side, the weight of the backpack and the cold are enemies that you will carry with you and that will not stop you will remember how much, to start this path, was a choice dictated by the youth of your thoughts and the desire to sink your boots on rough territory, on unbeaten roads, challenging not only the force of gravity and the absence of the right balance of oxygen , but also the many tricks on the part of your loved ones in asking you not to. To do nothing, they are the ones who have urged you to follow me silently towards a hill yet to reach. 
Hateful and at the same time lovable relatives who did not have the courage and inject you with small doses of fear to discourage you. I can't give you advice about them, listen to them if you feel like doing it, or leave them in the oblivion of their boring and unforgiving living room. It's up to you to decide, one of the many peaks to climb. 
Two nights in the cold, diary of a time that has no value, when it is day the sun burns your shoulders, at the fall of it at night challenges you with its catabatic winds that blow on the hundred fifty kilometers howling to the grayness of a moon hidden by a few rade clouds and quas skeletal. The stars, small bright touches left in the air, from here look really like celestial bodies, cold to the touch without ever touching them. 
The earth has stopped appearing, letting small grassy clods here and there a life be created among the furks of the rock, are paradoxical entities that feed on pure oxygen, bow ingeken me closer and closer to that glow of natural perfection of which I will never be Full.

Laying on the edge of a rocky boulder bare of any vegetation as if it had been abstracted from a larger block I greet again the sun that goes away. Gradually it gives me time, with the last glimmers of light, to set up my base camp. A tent with an electric stove inside and twelve food rations. Hunger is the last to show up at the door, immediately after fear, enthusiasm, joy, and various instincts that I perceive as survival. 
The walls of the curtains bend inwards, another night of wind excited to blow towards the small torch that from the heart of my shelter illuminates a book dear to me, written by Lawrence D'Arabia. His exploits in the desert put so much warmth in my body warming up and tightening my thoughts towards the solidarity of another adventurer. The salt and the warm desert on which the feet really sink and not only as in a momentary illusion given by fatigue. His bedding, animal skins or living camels used as home, animated companions of travel. Not just animals, but desert ships.
Dreams vanish, making way for the reality of the facts, the mountain in front of me and a path left behind conquered hard.

A small mirror that I brought to look at myself reflects the image of a tired man, a long beard and skin scalded by the frost of a dry air. I turn off the torch and let myself be lulled by the mighty breath and thorny blankets that are also cold. I have left comfort elsewhere, here I sleep where I can without being able to do so many useless formalities, a rock, or under what looks like a tree, or between two boulders hoping it will not become a corridor for the spiffs or the refuge of a restless animal. Good night to heaven and cold counting the days of walking that I have left.
There is a fact that upset me when I woke up outside the tent, small stocky birds covered with feathers with a strange prominent belly had rested on the wire of my tent and immediately frightened by my presence they escaped leaving behind some Feather. I managed to grasp in their small dark eyes the true essence of fear, perhaps suspicious from my makeshift home they came to snoop around the early hours of the morning when the light was still too dim to stand. Fly away as the hope of finding more encounters on this path that seems abandoned to itself, not ready to receive me. There is embarrassment between the two of us, I do not know how to behave, every step could be fatal, no one to support me or with which to reflect on my choices. There you are, and who knows where you are right now, I don't know if you'd like to be here to challenge your luck and win you a piece of respect that's nowhere to be found. I'm afraid and if you come you will have one too.

My jacket slowly loses its padding and I slipped for a mantle of pebbles that I had not calculated, it happened a couple of pages ago but I decided only now to tell you about it so as not to put you anxiety or make you fear for the worst. I got away with a few bruises and a few tears. I can only tell you that I did not have time to relive my life but only to imagine my death as heartbreaking it had been for me. With a disarming speed the thought of dying at the bottom of a few cliffs in total solitude made me tremendously distant from any human thought, I turned into a machine and in great strides, making room with hard force and deceiving nature surrounding, I conquered a pointed pile attacking it with one hand and holding on to it. And I realized i've reached the highest point. 
Only now do I realize that I really are there, that I have spent twenty-one days on this side, that I have not made any sound for almost a month, that I have eaten little and nothing, feeding only my hopes and dreams. I could have died for these two lovable witnesses who as decorated nursery rhymes are illustrated as emotions. And I'm here now, the white snow spreads for cloud-covered peaks, and there's nothing narrative at the bottom of it, as I wish you could see it with me, hanging and standing by a thread of force.
I feel like a thief who for days has dreamed of stealing this sight and the intrinsic happiness of such a true mirage, that of looking out into the world and savoring this subtle air.