The landscape looks like a piece of paper on which a hand has unintentionally scribbled a few signs – here a little tree stands still in the winter air, there a rock rises out of the snow. The world is at once light and dark – dusk in the middle of the day, entirely immersed in grey.
Like cold butter, snowflakes slap me in the face. Ice crystals stay hanging from the eye-lashes, melt under the warm pressure of the tears that the frost forces out of my eyes and flow like salted water down over the cheeks, onto the lips and into the mouth.
One never knows how deep one will sink – sometimes only to the ankles, at other times up to the thighs. All of a sudden, there’s ice below the snow, one goes slipping, falls. I have long lost the way. Perhaps my eyes could no longer figure out the way after all the strain they’d suffered – or the path had simply petered out. In this landscape I see pugmarks/traces that are non-existent – and, where I believe the steps lead towards the top, they actually lead downwards.
I would so like to hear the cackle of a crow, the cheerful chirp of an alpine chough, the call of a skier. There is however only the plop of flakes on my jacket, the dry squish of my boots in the snow, and the muffled rustle of the wind blowing about under my hood.
When I glance back, I can scarcely discern the traces of even those of my footsteps immediately behind me – a few metres later, the traces vanish into the grey. I feel like a text written on a sheet of paper in a very light shade of ink: hardly are the words completed when the first alphabet dissolves all over again.
First Publication: 25-4-2014
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