There are people born to reach the heights,
and there are people born
to look up at them
and search for their heroes there.

I belong to the second kind.

But sometimes I wonder
what the first kind hears.

Because surely,
after the first summit,
after the photographs,
the flags,
the records,
the proof that you stood
where almost no human being can stand,

they could come home.

They could say,
I have seen enough.

And yet they go back.

Nirmal Purja went back.

After fourteen peaks,
after impossible had already bent
beneath his feet,
there was still another morning,
another rope,
another wall of ice,
another thin blue line
between the living
and everything beyond it.

Broad Peak was waiting.

And I keep thinking:

what was it that called him?

Not fame.
Surely fame becomes too small
at eight thousand metres.

Not conquest.
You cannot conquer something
that can erase you
without even knowing your name.

So what is left?

Perhaps there are places on this earth
that speak only to certain souls.

Ali Sadpara must have heard them too.

K2 in winter.
That black pyramid of rock and snow
rising into a sky
that seems almost unfinished.

He knew what lived up there.
The cold.
The dark.
The place where breath becomes precious
and one wrong step
can become forever.

Still, he went.

And years later, Nirmal went.

And somewhere inside me
is this strange ache
for men who keep walking
toward the very thing
the rest of us would run from.

I feel it when I look at mountains.

I feel it when I look at space.

Perhaps because they are almost the same thing.

Mountains rise until Earth
begins to disappear.

Space begins where Earth
finally lets you go.

Both are enormous.
Both are silent.
Both remind us
how very little of existence
was made for us.

And I love them from here.

From my chair.
From my window.
From photographs and documentaries
and late-night images
of galaxies whose light began travelling
before anyone knew
there would one day be eyes
waiting to see it.

I do not need to stand on K2.

I do not need to leave the Earth.

But God,
I understand the looking.

That feeling
that somewhere beyond the ordinary world
there is something
you cannot quite name.

Something behind the clouds.

Something beyond the atmosphere.

Something that says,

come closer.

Most of us hear it
and remain where we are.

Some hear it
and spend their lives answering.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Until one day
the mountain does not give them back.

And perhaps that is why
we call them legends.

Not because they were unafraid.

But because somewhere
between the safety of home
and the terrible beauty of the unknown,

they heard something
the rest of us could only imagine,

and followed it
all the way.