Weekly Writing – April 29 2023

She stopped at the forty-eighth kingdom, above the clouds but still below the stars, when she realized that the forty-seventh was the last place she had felt human.
There had been a festival of some sort happening when she’d passed through. What they’d been celebrating hadn’t been clear, but it had been bright, there had been an implausible amount and variety of food for a place with only the rock to scrape it from, and she had given in to the temptation to linger, just for a little while.
Just for the evening. Being jostled around by other people for the first time in such a long time, she hadn’t felt very human, but like a numb limb with blood just starting to prickle and burn back into it. Waking back up to the way it felt to smile at strangers.
They’d invited her to stay. Just the night, they’d said, but she’d seen the trap in it. One night could too easily become two, and then a hundred, and then she would look up the mountain one day to realize she’d forgotten she was making a journey at all.
They had seemed somehow so mournful and urgent about it, even smiling. They had offered her life among other people, food and light, and, she’d only realized after climbing a mile or two away from it, a last chance to live almost like she would have in the valleys.
Everything above was only colder and darker. The sorts of people who made it even higher before stopping would be less and less like those she’d left below. And so would she.
The forty-eighth kingdom was a stark, mournful, monastic place, full of people who’d stopped when they’d realized that. That heaven, if it was waiting over fifty kingdoms above, would be full of nothing like the people who’d set out to reach it. And if they reached it, they would be nothing like themselves.
Maybe that was the test they all passed or failed – deciding whether it was more important for them to reach heaven or be human. If so, she couldn’t damn herself for deciding to fail. Maybe she would even try, one of these days, to be the first person who climbed a little ways back down. Wouldn’t the people in the forty-seventh kingdom be surprised if she walked into their next festival from the opposite direction?