The rock

He comes to the mesa in his forties and the rock is still there.

Long ago, fresh out of college, he and a golden girl had lain in the bare sun and made love on the rock, and it had felt as though a precipice greater than the mesa had been reached, possibilities spanning out into the valley before him but one, meaningfully, chosen.

Nearly a decade after that first encounter, laid off from his job due to austerity, it caused some solace that the rock was still there. He was going through his divorce at the time, and the house echoed with the cries of young life, and panic attacks and fatigue bled into routine’s sour undercurrent. In that phase, one of his most soothing thoughts was that of the rock, baking in the sunlight and yet perfectly content.

In another two decades from present, in his sixties, he will return to the mesa and the rock’s infallibility will feel surreal. By that time, his brother will have died with a gun in his mouth, and his eldest son will have graduated from college, and it will feel odd that through all these turbulations the rock camped there, still. Birds shat upon the rock; squirrels frolicked upon it, their eyes keening for predators and nuts in their mouths. Perhaps another pair of lovers had sex on the rock, believing themselves the first; perhaps the man and his golden girl had not been the first, either.

In some moments, he will imagine dying upon the rock, in some way sinking into and merging with it so that to some future visitor, it will appear no man was ever there. In some sense, that is his deepest desire: not to have been here, to have sluiced as water amidst water.

When he is too old to hike the mesa, and his son is as old as he is now—in his forties—that son will take his own children up to see the rock, and they will run across it, jump up and down atop it, celebrating their apparent mastery over the vista which is the rock’s companion. Other families will do this too, will carry on parallel traditions; others yet will act in league without so intending, frequently and casually hiking the mesa trail and scuffing their shoes along the rock.

The man doesn’t know how to feel about the rock, about its proud, exalted status while all else shifts around it. Words have come to him, feeling-words such as wistfulness, nostalgia, reverence, déjà vu. None strikes as sufficient, and yet all gesture toward something that, with each passing moment, grows both more subtle and more insinuated in him. Like a tree’s roots snaking themselves around a pebble lodged in soil, for decades now—and maybe before he ever encountered it—the rock has wound its way into the man’s soul, anchoring him as no physical presence ever could.

The rock overlooks a city, overlooks busyness, activity, strife, hope. The rock overlooks these things with a soundless smile.