Live longer. Reserve "Pillars" in Krasnoyarsk

Copper, covered with light green oxide dilutions, the cigarette case slipped out of his hands and with some frighteningly cheerful sobriety flew down, hitting the bumpy stone wall and bouncing back and forth from its thousands of irregularities, angles and faces.

He reflexively clenched his fists, cursed and immediately covered himself with vapor, imagining how he stumbled and, like a bag of potatoes falling from a freight car, rushed to the foot of the mountain after the escaped piece of metal. It was twisted...

With a brisk step, he crashed into the foggy coolness of the autumn forest, tearing sagging, ice-dew-filled webs, swaying yellow-tinted leaves.

He walked, feeling the warm weight of the backpack behind his back, feeling the pleasant heaviness and tension of each step, feeling how reluctantly but irreversibly the weight of uncertainty, regrets, anguish, doubts from the head filled with transparent protected air goes away. Fresh and dense, with a tart taste of burnt foliage and wormwood. The path dug up by snakes of tree roots went up, and somewhere in front of elastic, springy turf was replaced by red stony mounds, and the forest gave way to mountain Lilliputs rugged with scars of wind, water and sun. The forgotten toys of runaway giants.

He walked confidently and slowly. Carefully stepped on slippery, overgrown with green moss boulders. Climbing rough, in cracks and potholes, lumps. Saved your breath. He walked forward until, at last, the stones and trees parted to the sides, revealing to him a thin horizon line that was lost at the limit of visibility.

Before him was the whole world, every last drop. Maybe there was another world somewhere else, he didn't know for sure, he kind of forgot about it. The other world was alien, foreign and no one needed now. Or maybe even.

He stood on top and watched the wind-dancing coniferous carpet of trees. Soft and gentle in his hypnotic movement.

A light, wayward wind beat short-cut hair, sliding down the face. He looked into the silent and suddenly unfamiliar sky and sadly thought that it was impossible to stay on top indefinitely. Here you can scream and jump, have a snack and, wrapped in a thick sleeping bag, even spend a starry night. But you can't live here. This is not a parking place and not even a crossroads, it is a difficult long way, a straight road without forks and turns, where to jump - weakness, where to stay and freeze to death - cowardice. This is a place where there is only one way out: having gathered the last strength, the last remnants of the last strength, to go back, to go despite fatigue, fear, dizziness and humming legs.

Remember, they'll hum every descent until you train them. To know, no matter how beautiful and attractive she is, this is always the place where they die. Your strength is limited and your time is running out. You will not be able to conquer all heights in this life or the next. And standing at the foot, think whether it is worth another climb and a new descent. He tightened his backpack straps and went downstairs.

I found a single cigarette in my pocket. He crushed it and sent it after the cigarette case, only at the last moment, when the paper had already escaped from the tips of his fingers, feeling himself the last scum in relation to all this beauty. Eternal, all-powerful and at the same time defenseless.

Live longer. Longer to live...

Author of text and photo: Konstantin Levtin