The Spaghetti Principle

6 HOURS EARLIER:

Picture me in Bhutan, panting like my dog after running, hunched over, and seeing birds float comically in circles around my forehead. Not my most flattering angle, but what can I say? I gotta do what I gotta do. I was, what? 10 minutes in, and the altitude was already getting to me. The trek started with a steep, so I was half-dragging myself up the 35ish percent gradient. The terrain was gravel, reddish brown, and my knees were knocking against each other because I was afraid the tiny pebbles would give out beneath my weight. I was an engine, running solely on adrenaline and the promise of a real Himalayan view. In one of my previous blogs, I had written something about the air being taken out of my lungs, and that was pretty much the case. No, it wasn’t that it was gorgeous to look at this time — It was, seeing the rainbow colored city of Paro from the eye of a bird, engulfed in luscious mountains dotted by trees, and bordered by paddy fields with clear water reflecting the cloud-ridden sky — but because I was literally breathless, my lungs’ cry for oxygen the only noise in the peaceful trail.  My dad fumbled for a chocolate in his bulky black bag. I had told him countless times to get a more “aesthetic” color, but since black was one of the eight colors he knew, and his monotonous favorite tone, he had kept it nonetheless. I did what I usually did, broke the gooey squares up evenly by the marked lines, then left the piece of Dairy Milk on my tongue as it melted, stained my tongue brown, and sent the warm sensation of an embrace down my spine.

5 HOURS EARLIER:

And there it was — that one urge that came after the initial adrenaline rush and before the gnawing sense to fight for victory — This little old feeling called wanting to give up. Had happened many times before, would happen many times again. My chest was hurting, my legs were quivering, my breath was unsteady, and the easy tears sprung up to my eyes. “Let’s quit while we’re ahead.” I laughed nervously. Nobody responded, and then I realized I said that in my head. I sighed and turned away for just a second to let out a sigh of frustration and shed a small tear. I didn’t want to do this anymore. “Aw, c’mon!” My mom picked up on my exhaustion “The hard part is over, the fun part is yet to come!” I was sure she was lying to me, because that “almost there” thing was pretty overused. However, I still was powered by the knowledge I had been fed since I was a kid — I am not a quitter. Okay, fine, I grudgingly admitted to no one in particular, I’ll keep going.

4 HOURS EARLIER:

I had made peace with the tiredness that came along with the painful breathlessness, and the adaptability that got me from ape to human was kicking in. I had ended up in the plains of a dead forest. Charcoal razed trees flooded my vision and I could see the flames licking the sky in my mind’s eye. The ground was ashy and muddy both, the ominous presence of death and devastation lurking around the shrubs. It’s crazy how beautiful nature can be, even in its darkest moments. The treetops were needles poking holes in the blue. If I had the skills to not completely fail my Art class at school, this would be the first thing I would paint. I chatted amiably with my parents as I — very discreetly and politely, I might add — forced them to play games with me. 20 questions, 21 dares, Finish the Lyrics, and that one memory game everyone plays and nobody knows the name for, they all came out. Laughing merrily, chatting, and taking in the stunning views, that was all I was doing. As we walked on a thin ridge, maybe 5 feet wide, with a long drop on both sides, my mom shrieked. “Bear! Bear!” She squawked, a high, unpleasant sound. My guide stepped to the side. I, at the far back, quickly backed off and ducked behind a rock, my mom following behind me. My dad strode forward lightly with one wry eyebrow raised. A few seconds later, a cart pulled by three horses and one donkey drove by, bumping and bobbing up and down on the rocks on the side. I laughed “Bear, huh?” Any other lady would have flushed with embarrassment, but my mom wasn’t any other lady. She laughed too.  It was then and there I realized how important it was for me to finish, and how fun it was going to be. I had to finish, no doubt about it.

3 HOURS EARLIER:

I had my headphones popped in, and was listening to my Spotify playlist. One thing my friends might notice about me is that I listen to music whenever I find a window. So, half listening to our amazing tour guide — We weren’t tour guide kind of people, but Bhutan mandated having one, and our guide was sweet and worth it — as he told us how far we were from the lunch point, I planted my feet firmly on the next rock. I was thinking about how music suddenly fixed me, almost. I mused over it for a while, and out of the blue, ten minutes later, piped up and said “Sometimes exhaustion and boredom aren’t that different.” I was learning things about myself. How to enjoy the quiet. How to be resilient. How to breathe normally at high altitude. And now, the art of random, thought-through statements. I wasn’t wrong about the boredom-exhaustion thing, though, and now that my boredom had disappeared, my exhaustion seemed to have disappeared too. I must tell you this, though — There is nothing more satisfying than taking a nature pee with your music on.

2 HOURS EARLIER:

We had arrived at the lunch point. I clambered up a too-steep ladder into the shop, sitting criss-cross on the floor mattress set down for us “wary travellers.” The food, though ordinary — chicken, rice, lentils, and beans — was delicious, maybe because I was crazy hungry, or maybe it was cooked with love, not a cold and soggy McChicken burger. I scarfed it all down in one go, sipping hot water because it had become eerily cold. So cold that when my clumsiness led me inevitably to drop the hot water, it barely burned. Within seconds, chilly drops of water were crashing into the ground so hard the patter of rain was deafening. We sat. We waited. We checked the clock. We looked out the window. We heard rain. We waited some more. Finally, we decided to suck it up and go through the rain, because a little birdie called the Weather Forecast told us that the rains were not going anytime soon. “Bka drin che la”(Pronounced Kah – deh – n – cheh – lah)I thanked the shopkeeper in Dzhongkha, the national language of Bhutan, and we slipped out the door. I could hear my stomach growling in protest, because it had been three seconds after leaving and it was already hungry again.

1 HOUR EARLIER:

The sky had been tinted a murky grey from the rain clouds that towered above us. The ground? A sticky mess, producing an odd squelch if we stepped in the wrong place. My school shoes — they were my most comfortable sports shoes — were painted brown. My music was still roaring in my ears, and every time it stopped as it moved to the next song, the slam of rain against my raincoat was like thunderous applause. The birds that earlier were twittering had now disappeared into a cozy tree in a flurry of feathers. The stones were slicked with the clean rain, the grass flattened down by the pressure. We were on the last uphill, and I could see our campsite, green tents that stood out against the rest of the green mountain, canvas fluttering slightly against the rough wind. I could taste the victory of completion, and in just maybe ten minutes I would be there. Good, right? Too good to be true. And that was then the loving Mother Nature, whom, as I was told as a kid, cares for all, decided it would hail. At first, when it started, it felt like pins and needles, and I looked at my gloveless hands and wondered “Is it that cold that my hands are numb?” My tour guide worriedly looked at my dad and muttered something about hail. That was when I realized. I had bitten my tongue to stop myself from screaming — from fear of the pain or the excitement at seeing something I never had before, I didn’t quite know. So I shoved my hands in my pockets, slunk deep into the hood of my raincoat, and we ran.

CURRENTLY (TECHNICALLY, 3 SECONDS EARLIER BECAUSE TYPING TAKES TIME):

I’m sitting curled up under four blankets in my tent, snug as a bug, as I type this. I did it. Sticks and stones have broken my bones — or rather thorns and poorly timed rain have — and I am exhausted, sore, and stink like the cow dung I avoided on the way up because camping has no shower. One could argue that my scraping-by wasn’t a success, but to that I would respond “I’m still up here, aren’t I?” And now, because my Netflix downloads are over, except for one series that I downloaded in the wrong language, and because one can only stare into space for so long, I’ve decided to think. To add a headache to my arm-ache, leg-ache, foot-ache, butt-ache, and every other ache in my body that I’m not medically qualified to diagnose. I write this in my mental diary:

Humans are stupid creatures.

They do stupid things that risk their health and life, not because they need to survive, but because they “want” to.

People climb tightropes and wrestle bears and tame tigers because they “want” to, and they know very well that that could leave them as roadkill, cautionary tales to be ignored by other stupid humans.

A cheetah will run miles to survive, a bird will fly kilometres for food so its baby can survive, a lion will kill a deer to survive, a wolf will kill a wolf to survive.

Yet we waltz in and dance with death for the thrill of it.

I survived today.

I could have died from the freezing cold, from slipping off a rock, from plummeting off the side of the cliff, from collapsing from sheer exhaustion, and a thousand more unprecedented scenarios my nightmares could only dream off.

But I didn’t.

And you know what? I struggle to see a world where we only do things to survive, because frankly, that world is unlikely, but moreover, that world is boring.

Not the kind of world I want to live in.

I close the mental diary, and open my G-docs to write this. My advice to you, dear Reader, is not to be taken literally, but to be taken seriously indeed: Life is better when you live on the edge.