LJ Idol, Literary Priize Fight - Week 10: Nadir

Embers pop. Steam and heat and light are released skyward. The desert air is cold, but layers of fleece and down keep Bryn’s tired muscles and core warm. Cool beer is a balm by the warm fire, as are fleece socks bounded only by toe-freeing sandals. Bryn is sitting among friends, watching sparks pop upward toward the stars spangled across the sky. Energy that has been released hurtles briefly toward space. It dissipates as it goes, like grief and sadness will if you can release them.

The fire is a foolish thing. Everyone has stoves that could warm water and food more efficiently, but nothing is better as a social center than a fire. To a woman and man, the whole group are environmentalists of one stripe or another. Most of them teach leave no trace ethics to the friends they bring into the wilderness regularly and some teach wilderness skills by profession.

Bryn has no doubt that the same young man who packed in the wood will pack out any ashes left after tonight. Still, no one is complaining about the carbon footprint of the burning logs tonight. People are enjoying smiles and eyes reflected in warm reds and oranges.

Some of the crew sits on empty packs, but others brought in light chairs or sit on the ground. People are physically tired, but filled with that positive mental energy that is replenished by a day striving hard under the sun. It had been great weather for climbing, just crisp enough to prevent one from noticing their sweat, but not so cool that hands exposed directly to the rock suffer. One threesome is still at the base of the wall, having cleaned their last route by headlamp. Bryn almost envies those three their energy as she stretches her feet toward the fire.

The companions who have been back at camp long enough to eat and start to relax proposed some order to the raucous conversation around the flames- a game of sorts. A topic would be given and they each had a chance to respond to it in turn. It was a big enough group that she found it fun to learn more about some of the newer friends.

It was fun to think about how they envisioned her, too. She and her friend Ky were the oldest in this group by far, the only ones that had made it to retirement age, though she still worked different jobs seasonally. Sometimes it was easy to forget how significant the age gap was, between her and the youth, especially with some of the middle aged folks here who also had families. She could see herself in all of them. It was an animated group of the younger people who came up with the idea and the first of the questions in this game, though, and a young woman not long out of college that she had climbed with today asked the next one.

“What has been your lowest point, emotionally?” She asked, eyes falling toward the fire as her long hair slid forward, following them as she briefly dipped her head. “How did you get through it to be here tonight?” She continued as feet shuffled near her.

The man who’d packed in the wood started his answer, and Bryn realized that this was going to be an answer that likely emphasized her difference in age with most of them. What would they expect her to answer, she wondered. Most of them knew that she’d lost her spouse after a long battle with a nasty disease and knew that she had daughters who were grown now.

Would the expectation be that the hardest times were the break points when loss happened? The girls leaving home? The loss of her parents? Losing her partner that final time, or one of the hundred losses for him that came before that? The milestones hadn’t been easy, but she was certain those hadn’t been the lowest time for her. Yes, the aftermath of wrenching milestones had been hard. But the lowest time for her was before those transitions.

The young man was talking earnestly about a period of indecision during his undergraduate years, of how the agony of not knowing how his path would unfold had brought him to a dark and anxiety-ridden place.

Maybe the younger folks wouldn’t be so surprised that the lowest times for her weren’t the big adjustments, but rather were in the years leading up to them, coming to terms with the inevitability of some of the bad things on the horizon.

What _would_ she pick as her lowest time? Probably pretty early on, when a lot of the struggle still stretched ahead of her and she wasn’t able to balance everything. There had been a time when her mental health strained to the point of breaking. It was hard to look back on it, even forty years later- hard to remember just how she had felt. She’d been so sure that people were out to get her specifically and so cripplingly sad about everything.

The thing was, even now, she felt a pang of anger for the sad, cornered self she had been. The world had, in fact, been unfair. Some people really had been out to get her. But the world had also been too much with her, then. She’d been certain she was the center of things that were happening- unable to face the reality that she, like so many others, was mostly just collateral damage for a great many things spun out of control.

She was glad that over half of this group was comprised of women, but sad that a lot of them faced very similar stereotypes and career hardships to the ones she’d lived with. That damned arc of justice just didn’t coincide well with human lifespans, she supposed. Though she also chided herself. Weren’t she and some of her companions here tonight also working to shorten that arc?

She had managed to keep a fulfilling career, and one that kept her sick husband in good health insurance, but she hadn’t risen through the ranks as far as her talent would have supported. It didn’t matter that she put in longer hours and made just as many controversial calls well as anybody. It took something even more than that if everyone knew you were also a woman with a family. Even if you were shorting that family when it came to your hours, because you were always at work, the assumption was that your heart was with the family first, much more than any such assumption dogged family men. Those assumptions were changing. But slowly. Too slowly for her taste.

The young man was wrapping up his tale, explaining how moving away from substance abuse, getting outside more had slowly helped him come to the realization that things weren’t so bad and that his fears weren’t so warranted. Bryn watched him struggle between a desire to put a pat satisfying ending on his story and the need to let it end with the realization that he wasn’t so very far away from that dark time yet.

“Maybe none of us really are,” she thought to herself as she searched for the right way to start her own story.