because we can

Saturday, a national holiday, the 17th of February, 2007

I slung my bag back over my shoulders, and marched beside my horse for the last five kilometres before reaching camp. The wind had a damp smell from the innards of the forests coating the hills beyond whose slopes another country lies.
The sky is a wondrous playground of entirety, and tonight, as I watched the development of the day, cloud by cloud, a piano went off in my head, well-tempered, playing on infinity and dimensions, baroquely disinclined to pauses.
I wake very early, when I sleep in cold conditions. For the length of rest that I physically need, my consciousness mutes the signals of distress, and my core organs are untaxed while I spend enough recuperation. Then at 4 am, before the birds, in the darkest of dark, I switch on.
It is cold, like petrified, and gentle.
And I coax my mind into my breathing and my skeleton, and then my body restarts behaving as if it has a purpose in this world.
This is how I don't contract a stomache ache from wrenching myself into motion.
We walk out of slumber, my horse and I, and when we are out of it, we eat breakfast, and then we contemplate the terrain on which to direct our first steps.