atop the holy mountain

or, you can run from your life but not from yourself

The cicada’s shrieking dopplered around you as the sun plummeted in the August sky. Hot, sweating, your shirt clinging to your back as you wandered higher and higher up that sacred mountain, the one that felt like a promise. Thousands of vermillion torii gates led from the crowded, bustling temple complex at the base of the mountain up into the cicada stuffed trees, the mountain full of hundreds or thousands of tiny shrines to Inari, to all the kitsune statues. You were almost alone on the mountain after days in Kyoto and Osaka crowds.

Following the trails up the mountain, the only sound your own breathing and the rhythmic cries of the cicadas swirling round the mountain, you felt lighter with every step higher. Every shrine caused you to stop, to say a silent prayer to no one in particular. A prayer of nothing for no one. Maybe for yourself, for the you you hoped to be. The you you hoped to find alone on this holy mountain so far from home.

You wanted an escape. Needed to be gone from your life and so you packed your only suitcase to move across the planet as an excuse to no longer see her. To try to stop dreaming about her. You told anyone who asked that your insatiable quest for adventure, for the pursuit of an interesting life, led you to abandon everyone and everything you knew to live as far away as possible from them.

You were twenty-two. You felt like dying, like maybe too much of you had died, a long time ago, through self-inflicted heartbreaks because you never learnt to take care of yourself, to not throw your heart away into the hands of so many strangers you knew for only an hour, a night, a week. Reckless romanticism, a compulsion to love so strongly so quickly, an addiction to your own sorrow.

Your new home was not what you expected. You found yourself alone even among those people who were so kind to you, who took care of you, who walked you through your new city. You threw yourself into new women compulsively in pulsing clubs, your skin slick with one another’s sweat, her whispered breath against your ear providing transient salvation. And so when you finally had time for a vacation, you left without telling anyone, left to go alone to Japan because a ballet dancer you loved told you that you should go to Osaka, her hometown. But really you were after meaning and hope. You’d look for them in an ancient capital full of ancient structures, in the ghosts of cultures you didn’t understand even after a year studying Shinto.

Fushimi Inari called to you even before you left home. A holy mountain.

A childhood inability to believe in god, in anything, sent you searching for gods across the world. In Irish gaols, in North Irish black taxicabs, in the ghosts of Montmartre alleys, in jagged German mountains piercing the sky, in stacked stones deep in Korean forests, in bodies in motion on dance floors wet with beer and wine and spit, in skin pressed against you as you howled smoke into the throbbing moonlit midnight.

The cicadas screamed, circling, as you made your way up the mountain. Reaching the top, looking out over a sun setting past the trees, past the cities, the sky’s blush smeared across all that you saw, all the weight slipped from your shoulders. Alone atop a sacred mountain, you smiled with relief, felt the tears clawing at the back of your eyes, at the top of your throat, and you didn’t know why but held it back out of habit. But then you let it go, let yourself weep as the sun fell away, as your heart knit its fractured fragments together.

You let the tears remain on your cheeks, on your neck, to meld with the sweat as you took a different path back down the mountain in the dying light, the cooling night. An hour later, you were at the wrong side of the mountain in a bamboo forest. Houses stood not too far away. Looking back up the mountain, the sky now inked with night, you considered knocking on a door and asking for a ride to a train station because you still needed to get back to your hostel in Osaka.

You didn’t have a phone. Didn’t speak enough Japanese to even ask for help. So you turned to the mountain again, walked up.

But there was no panic. You laughed as you trudged back up the mountain. Tired, alone, foolish, but still lightened, weightless. When you looked up you saw stars. Something you’d rarely seen since coming to Asia. Smiling, for you missed them, even if these stars were not your stars, their constellations different than those that shined over your up-all-night childhood spent staring at the moon out your window.

And when you reached the top of that holy mountain again, you felt somehow even lighter. Braver, as if nothing could hurt you again. As if all the heartache and depression could be breathed away up there beneath the stars staring over an unfamiliar world.