Poetry and All Things Alike

Into Thin Air

A/N: This was actually originally a creative writing project I did for English a few months ago, as a spin off Jon Krakuer's book Into Thin Air. But I figured hey why the heck not post it on here? So this is a bit longer than most of my other things and different from what I normally write, but hey oh well. Thanks for reading!

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As I lay here dying, struggling to keep my eyes open, I feel nothing.

The past eight weeks of my life flood my brain in a blur of miserable nothingness that I am unable to register in my weakened state.

I knew the risks of climbing Everest, but I was willing to take those risks. After all, there's risk in almost everything we do, right? Why not take those risks to do something amazing; to achieve my life-long dream of reaching the summit of the world. A dream stupid enough to get me to where I was now; dying on the side of a mountain.

Back home in Massachusetts, my life was plain and simple. Not that it was a bad life at all. In fact it was quite perfect. My husband, Josh, and I had grown up in the same small town so we knew each other's names and faces but never really talked till college. Both of us had enrolled in a local University, and ended up working together in the school's library.

We pretty much hit it off when he saw me reading a book about Everest, which sparked hours of conversations about hiking and our dreams and goals. We were married 5 years later.

After college, we spent all of our time hiking. It's what we loved to do. Of course, we had jobs. Josh was a photographer despite the fact that he had a degree in physical education, and I ran a hiking blog even though I had gone to college to be a journalist. So really, we didn't have all that much money, but we were happy. We put all of our money, time and energy into hiking, and saved up for our biggest shared goal; to reach the Seven Summits.

However, that dream was short lived. After only summiting Mount Kosciuszko, the smallest of the Seven Summits, and two months before we were scheduled to leave for Mount Vinson, we discovered that we were going to be parents.

This changed our lives, and made us realize that we really had to get it together. So Josh put photography aside and applied as a gym teacher at a few different high schools till he was finally accepted and hired. I began working for a local journal company, which luckily wasn't much of a change from blogging, and this way I was actually getting paid. These changes didn't make us rich by any means, but it's what we had to do if we were to raise a kid. We couldn't live on dreams anymore.

At the time, changing our lives like this seemed like a real burden to us. Like all of our dreams had just been ripped out of our hands after a single doctor's appointment. However, the second we both held Cayden, we knew it was all worth it.

So, we made our family work. We would work during the week. Josh would still recreationally take photographs, and I would update my personal blog when I had the time. On weekends we would go hiking as a family. Just not on the strenuous mountains that we had always planned to hike but on more local mountains that were not nearly as huge as the ones we always used to climb. It seemed like child's play compared to what we used to do.

Our daughter was a little less of a surprise than Cayden had been, and luckily there wasn't as many changes that we needed to make to bring her into our lives. But when Allanah came into the picture, life became extremely hectic. And the older they got, the less time we had. So, we traded hiking off for soccer games, dance recitals and play dates. But that didn't bother us one bit.

So when I was contacted by a journal company from Nepal, who had seen my blog which was now very popular, and all my journal columns, my life was changed once again. They asked me to climb Everest, not summit, just climb, and write an article for their newspaper about being an American hiker climbing Everest. I refrained from telling them I hadn't done any extreme hiking in 8 years,