First person internal narrator. Mood is loss. Tone is revealing, chatty, unashamed. Working on: staying inside, being in someone’s skin, not focusing on external world. Worried about revealing character.

The trees left shadows on the snow and the light seemed to be coming from nowhere in particular, as if the sun were just some blotch of white somewhere that I couldn’t even see. We were swaying pretty badly on this little bench dangling a dozen or so feet above the ground. The motor of the ski lift was making a terrific noise and I had to focus to keep my skis from getting tangled with the skis of the girl sitting next to me, though she hadn’t looked at me, so far as I could tell. She was talking to her friend and they were both blond and ponytailed and their teeth were perfect, and I could feel the insides of my own teeth growing plaque, or maybe mold. I noticed that I was clinging to my armrest. I was clinging to my armrest as if maybe one of these girls was about to lean over and push me over the edge, down into the trees. The trees were getting farther away and we were going higher and higher, and I wondered how it was that they had gotten all of us up here, with the wires and the poles and the little loops that dangled from the poles. I wondered who had thought of it first.

I was thinking this when the lift surged upward, past the last copse of trees, and suddenly everything was white and blinding and once my eyes adjusted I could see nothing but the mountain, angled like a beast. I wondered if there was a reverse button I could push, or a lever or something that would take me back down, but there wasn’t. My bladder tightened into a fist and I thought it might let loose on all the white snow down below. I hoped it didn’t because these girls were sitting next to me, and I didn’t know what they would do if I just started urinating there like an old dog. I couldn’t take my eyes off the snow, and the people down below in their multicolored coats shoop shoop shooping on their skis. After a few seconds of looking I felt my fear turn into something that wasn’t fear, and whatever it was seemed to get tangled up in my gut and squeezed on my lungs. If I had had to describe it, if anyone had been there to ask me, I would have had to say that what I felt was a kind of vice-grips-on-the heart longing. It was strange to be thinking this, dangling from a wire with these two high-pitched girls. But for a second I wanted to turn and touch them, just to reach out and touch them, or at least smile at one of them or something. And I was glad to be here. I realized that I was glad to be there. I was glad and I was looking up and I thought that if there was a God up there watching, if there was a God who might have turned to look at the mountain just then, and me dangling there next to it, we might have had something to talk about, Him and me. We might have had something to discuss.

My heart was pounding and we were getting higher and higher and I could feel the blood pulsing inside of my blood vessels – the big one, the vena cava – and I hoped that I wasn’t having a heart attack, because surely they didn’t have any defibrillators up here. I thought about those Bayer commercials, how Bayer was supposed to prevent heart attacks, and wished that I had taken some Bayer down at the bottom of this mountain, because then maybe my heart wouldn’t feel like it was about to burst. I looked over at the girls and decided that they would be completely useless to me in an emergency. We were a good ways up the mountain by now, and I could see, way up ahead, people starting to get off of the ski lift – just up and get off and leave their benches dangling on the wire – and I wished that my heart would stop pounding, and I wondered what happened if you didn’t get off at the top, if you just kept going with all the empty seats. But they never let you keep going, do they? They always make you get off.