I kept climbing, slowly, not out of weakness but out of a refusal to speed up, as if each step had to be chosen, assumed, torn from the slope. It wasn't exhaustion that slowed me down. It was something else. A more diffuse, older weight. A kind of inner resistance, almost sacred, that wanted me to feel each degree, each roughness, each beat of air as proof that I was not fleeing.
And yet, even the air, that breath supposedly meant to support the effort, seemed to have turned against me. It helped nothing. It oppressed. It clung to the skin like an invisible fever, clammy and insidious, seeping into the nostrils, into the throat, down to the depths of the lungs, to deposit a film of soft but constant asphyxiation — a suffocating sensation that didn't kill, but gnawed slowly, patiently, as if the atmosphere itself refused to carry me.
