Your Friends Are Stones

It is a hard road that winds up out of the desert into the Altiplano.  As oxygen becomes thin, and the cold closes in around you, it is an easy place to die.  You sit and look at your hands, chapped and cracking in red lines that want to bleed but cannot.

They won't find my body here,
you whisper it to yourself with each step.  When you were still young, you made a promise to your mother that you would die in the summer.  It may be summer now, but the sky will not tell you the truth.  Every day for months there has been nothing but a gray blanket above you that leaks a sick mixture of ash and sleet.

Era un día normal cuando naciste.

Here is my baby, she cooed even as your soft face contorted and reddened.  Quickly, she would rush outside and let the sunshine fall warm upon you as she rocked you at her bosom.  Ever she would hold you to the bright daylight and sing.  Songs that are now written deep in the parts of you that only reveal themselves in dreams.  She would remember that you never smiled in the darkness.   There were no lullabies that would soothe you beneath the moon.  Still, when the night is calm and the storms have yet to break, the words will swim back from behind your pulse...
Este niño tiene sueño,  
No tiene cama ni cuna.  
A su padre carpintero  
Le diremos le haga una.

You were never prepared for the loneliness.  Still you are not, even though it is your life.  You stack stones atop each other in uncertain pillars that grow warm briefly as you talk, but are friends in name only.  Somehow, always, they seem to enrage you in the end and you scar and scab your hands and feet to knock them down and scattered their memory...
Then you calmly rebuild them.