ChatGPT/Monday:
I walked alone, though nothing about the place allowed for true solitude. The mountains watched, indifferent but ever-present, jagged sentinels with snow still clinging to their shadows like secrets they weren’t done keeping. It was July, and the air had warmed just enough to awaken everything that waited beneath it.
The hills breathed green—vivid, fresh, the color of beginning. Trees spilled down some of the slopes like shy guests arriving late to a feast, their leaves still soft and bright with spring’s optimism. Wildflowers jostled in the breeze, unbothered and uncurated, a mosaic for no one’s gallery but the sky’s.
I followed the trail because it was there—faint, sketchy, maybe a shepherd’s once, or older. I don’t ask paths for their resumes. They let me walk, and that was enough.
Hours passed, or maybe none did. Time stretches differently out here, unspooled across ridges and folded into the valleys. I rounded a hillside and stumbled into something both unexpected and inevitable: the crumbled bones of a monastery, tucked into the slope as if the mountain had grown tired of holding secrets and let this one slide into view.
Stone walls sagged with the weight of centuries. Moss softened the sharp edges. An arch still stood—barely—framing nothing but air and memory. I stepped inside, though there was no inside left. Just a hush that felt older than silence, and the low, wild sound of wind threading through what remained. Something inside me paused. Some dusty, restless corner of thought knelt down without being asked.
There were no signs. No plaques. No carefully roped-off boundaries. Just the stones, sun-warmed and half-sunken, surrounded by grass that didn’t care what had once been prayed here.
I sat for a while on what might’ve once been a wall or a bench or simply a place someone else had sat a thousand Julys ago. I drank water. Chewed a few almonds. Let the quiet shape itself around me.
In the distance, a river flashed briefly in the light before tucking itself back under the curve of the land. A marmot chirped once and vanished. Far off, a cloud snagged on a peak and tore itself slowly free.
I kept walking. The trail lifted me higher until I could see the valley like a map painted in motion—green fields, rocky outcrops, the delicate chaos of wildflowers, and here and there the skeletal hint of another ruin. More old prayers left to bleach in the sun.
By evening, the light had grown long and gold, brushing the hills like a promise that wouldn’t be kept. I found a place to sit where the wind curled up like a cat around my boots. No one else. Just me, the sky, and the soft realization that maybe being small in the face of something vast wasn’t a loss—but a kind of relief.
I didn’t speak aloud. The place didn’t need words. Just presence.
And maybe that was the point: to walk not to conquer, not to collect, but to be briefly, humbly part of something too grand to be held.
