We drove into Wednesday. In raucous and self -percussion, drumming our excitement into one another. Singing reckless songs into an icy snow-less night.

But when the rest stopped to chat on the trail, I ran ahead. I wanted the quiet; to prepare myself I wanted to feel my body fight the cold. The heat in my calves forcing retreat from the air as they burned straight up the mountainside. I'd stop every few hundred feet, every few switchbacks, and turn off my headlamp and wait for the cold to come back.

It'd be near morning before we would see any meteors. Above the Payette, silver spilled-milk cloudy and splashdyed blue near the green-black midnight mountain was a swollen midwinter moon. The cloud conduit carried her glow in an arc across the river basin, and from ridgeline to ridgeline the sky pulsed brightly enough to make the icy rushing river as perfectly contrasted as a black and white photo.

So I walked alone to feel my skin prickle at the shy proposition the cold made it. The 20 degree wind with it's entreaty to tremble; coaxing shivers from exposed skin. The trail which steepened, and legs which answered, pushing up.

I reached the top and took my time undressing. Waited long enough for friends to catch up. The noise, the excitement returning. The freedom of near-strangers, and the best of friends changing in the night a white arm here, a stumbling foot here. White wine being unloaded, bodies unburdened bare to the sky, and then recloaked for modesty, for shamefacedness.

I thought I'd be lonely. I always am at the hot springs. The water heated in the gut of the ancient earth, spilled forth as what? a gift? the excrement of a sleeping earth? I find baptism in the joy, and am nearly always silenced by it, humbled and quieted. But I wasn't lonely.

When we climbed back down it was 5 AM and the moon had refused to set. The boulders in the river were still onyx shining with near frozen moisture and the river was a thousand shades of blazing white, and brighter than the moon in it's return of her light. And 5 of us snuggled up in the back of the truck.

My friends, talking in two's beside me until the the clouds started to clear, and the meteors came. Insisting on being seen, on outshining both the bloated moon and river. And we were children, squealing with delight.

Fat meteors dripping down molten through a sky. Me, silent in the middle. Alone, and entirely unlonely.

And I think maybe when we drove back at 8 AM, all of us humbled, exhausted, content, listening to Elephant Revival, I was looking for something bigger.

The rest of the world was getting up, and dressing for their day, for hump day. Coming over the top of things and cresting the hard times, escaping their bottoms, their darkness. I'm not. I'm at the bottom of a great big canyon, and climbing up, just to climb back down, and fighting the cold just to feel it tug at my skin all the better. And there is so much to be done, so much to push through, and Wednesday is just another day.

Yup, I'm at the bottom. But there's no darkness here. So I think I've got it right

Oh, and...

By the way.

I'm back.

I've missed you.

To He-Who-Holds-the-Corkscrew:

    If time, or science, has not given back what my eyes have taken. If i am still walking home, the three miles home, to our home, when I meet you, when that day comes, and I walk in that door flushed, and cold, and wondering how sight took so much from me; when i have an armload of breakfast groceries and a bottle of red wine, and my hair is a mess, and four cars have catcalled me, when life is imperfect, and I couldn't bring myself to call you to come rescue me,  and when the plastic bag's broken, and when I did not wear enough layers, please still love me. No matter how I look, or feel, or sigh for the moment. Please open the bottle, and open your lap, and open your heart. Because I walked all that way to you.

love, the girl who stomped half a block, before she remembered you were waiting and couldn't help smiling again.