Flare

Snow up here is not soft. It is a crust that remembers the night. Each step is a small negotiation: the boot tests, the surface answers, then, sometimes, gives way with a sound like breaking crockery. Boulders sit close in the foreground, blunt and unmoved, their edges dusted, not decorated.

Down the valley, the river keeps its line. From this height it helps me lie to myself: a thin decision, a seam of intention. It isn’t. It’s drainage. It bends where it must, disappears into shadow, returns.

When the sun clears the ridge, the world becomes difficult to look at. The glare doesn’t warm so much as expose. Snow turns blank; the flanks of the mountains go dark; the peaks sharpen into silhouette. The camera insists on drama, of course it does. Those obedient spokes of the starburst. The eye, squinting, insists on getting through the moment.

As the sun climbs, detail returns without ceremony: pitted rock, scattered snowfields, a darker seam where water still moves. I watch it a beat longer than is useful, as if attention could settle a debt. Then I turn, careful not to slip, and go back down the way I came.