I can’t squint enough to block out the sun without closing my eyes. It’s like the sun has directed all its light into a single beam straight into my eyes. The pain slowly softens and I see the vast blue of the sky. 

It’s blue I don’t know how to describe. A powerful blue. It’s not a baby boy’s room blue, and not a night sky or blueberry blue. But that perfect blue in the middle. It almost looks transparent. Yet it is a sturdy wall between me and the stars. 

Clouds are scattered across the sky like the wisps of torn-apart cotton balls. In some places, the color of the sky mixes with the clouds. Like it would when mixing paint.

 I wonder what I look like from their perspective. The perspective of the clouds. Or maybe the perspective of the stars. Does this mountainous lake I stand next to matter? To the stars, this world is just a blue dot. 

---

Once I hung up a picture of the Earth taken from Pluto. I could not even see the earth from more than a foot away from that picture. 

As I laid on my bed looking at that, I found myself asking, “Why does my life even matter?” 

To the sky, I’m nothing but an ant in an anthill. To the stars, I’m nothing but a fleck of dust in a bag of marbles.

I took that picture down. 

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A river the size of a microscopic creek flows beside me. With one hop I clear it. What do the rocks at the bottom see? Is their vision warped by the clear liquid moving above? In their eyes, the world must twist and turn. 

 Do my eyes look enlarged like my friends’ eyes do when I see them through a water bottle? Eyes big like a bug. 

Or is seeing through water normal for the rocks, like the way I see through the air? And when I reach my hand into the liquid ice and bring one out into the air, is the rock’s vision distorted?

I throw the rock, and it flies on wings of gravity through the air, through the water, to the bottom of the lake. The lake, the reason we are here in the first place.

 If only I could jump in that lake. To cool off this winter jacket of sunlight. But the wind says it is still 40 degrees outside.  Sweating boatloads and feeling like a lobster boiling with your coat on. And feeling the wind go directly through your single layer of clothes and chill your skin like air made of ice when you take it off. 

Brown stalks stick out from the ground. They look like stick bugs. Actually, I guess stick bugs look like them. 

Their leaves separate from the stalk like the number of paths I can take in one life. They are creamy, tan, and brown. But I imagine flowers for days on them. I can see the flowers without seeing them. Like a filter my friends use on their phones.  

They are mango yellow with brown centers like coconuts, blue to match the sky with sun yellow in the middle, and deep violet purple. There are butterflies and dragonflies too. They extend over the whole field to the right. All the way up to the summit. And down the opposite mountainside, too. Obviously, the flowers do not grow over the lake, but the dragonflies hover over it. They chase after each other like my cats loudly playing tag downstairs when we are trying to fall asleep. The dragonflies are quiet though. 

I wish that painting that I made with my mind could come to life and we could walk through it, my family and I. But I guess there is no way for anyone else to really see what I see. 

I see both the brown stalks and the field of flowers at the same time. Like seeing through VR glasses. The screen on the phone shows you one thing, but you imagine the real world with your memory.  

---

I stop to sit on a boulder. It is grey. Not a simple flat grey, but a grey with texture. There are black specks. There are also clear, shiny, miniature, stone specks in it. Like our countertops, but on a smaller scale. 

When I lift my hand from the boulder, it is red from the pressure of my weight. There are little white indents in the red texture on my hand.

 I heard somewhere that when a pattern is left behind on your skin, it means you had a good nap. Whenever I wake up to find a pattern on my skin I feel like I just crawled out of a bowl of syrup. 

You only know you were sleeping when you have woken up.  When you are sleeping you don’t know you exist. I could bet that is what dying is like. Does this boulder I’m sitting on know that it exists? You can't call it dead because it was never living, but then what can you call it?

---

The sun bounces and reflects off the lake. It shimmers and shines like glitter. I can see everything from here: Mom, Dad, the lake, the tips of the mountains that cradle this lake in a basin, the shrub-like trees that dot the side of the hillsides. I can see everything. Everything but the field of flowers and butterflies.

---

I know what is behind me, to the right of me and the left, but when I look ahead, a wall stops me from knowing what is there. It’s a clear, dark navy blue wall, like the sky. The shy is technically see through. But I can’t see through it into space. It’s the same way with this dark wall. 

From the other side of the wall, I know I look like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff. Everything is behind me, to the left, and the right. But in front of me, there is nothing but a drop. 

---

This is the highest point I have been on this mountain. But it is not the summit. I know the summit is ahead. I cannot see it. How can I know it is ahead if I cannot see it? 

Mom says we have to go back. We have to make it to the car before it gets dark out.  I will never see the world from the summit. 

From the summit, I must look like a fish in a fish tank. There is a limit to where those fish can swim. They are blocked by a clear wall from the rest of the world.  

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  As we turned away, the sky bled into a semi-soft dark pink.  It’s a little darker than pink that they assign us little girls who have not yet decided we want to be girls.