Chairlift
Once when I was six I found myself suspended in air so cold my breaths felt like they were slowly and methodically killing me for sport. I was sandwiched between my two brothers and my father was on my far right. We were on a chairlift, we were in Colorado, we had driven many hours to come skiing. When we first arrived at the lodge, I got out of our rusted-red suburban and ran to the back to pull my skis out of the trunk. Our trunk had two doors that swung open individually. I remember my dad used to say they don’t make them like that anymore. You could open them in this really over-the-top dramatic way if you wanted to. Like the car was just a very deep old wooden wardrobe and my family lived inside it with books and paper maps.
My hands were bare and I clenched the tips of my skis for what felt like thirty seconds before I felt a pain so intense I used the memory of it as a baseline for my tolerance as I grew up. I began to cry and my father rushed over, covering my hands with his and blowing on them quickly before pushing me inside.
I really liked skiing. I was an anxious child, so I was surprised to find myself enjoying it. I liked my snowsuit very much and how nondescript I must have appeared to everyone with it and my helmet and goggles on.
I liked the chairlift the most because of how quiet it was. I thought about the chairlift a lot, even after we finished skiing for the day and went to bed. I thought about how manufactured it was and I wasn’t sure if I was meant to be so high up. It felt incorrect, not because of some inherent danger, but because I felt like I was trespassing on a certain level of the atmosphere without its permission.
On one of our last days in Colorado, we got on the same chairlift we had been taking over and over again the last few days. My brothers on either side of me were fighting. I looked down, my chin resting on my mittened hands that clenched the metal bar keeping us all captive. The snow below made me wonder if that kind of limitless plane was what the first moments of death or birth looked like. I wasn’t sure which, but I was certain it was a form of some in-between moment of consciousness on one end or the other of life.
There were pockets of snow we moved above that appeared completely untouched (by skis, by falling branches, by wind) and this fact made me very afraid. I was agitated because their intactness was out of my control. I wanted to reach out a pinky and trace a line on their surfaces. I wanted to stamp my boot in just one of them. Because otherwise, I would have to believe that some things are just formed and have no other visible utility. I was not able to understand these siloed instances.
I was slipping under the metal bar and then I was under it. I could hear my snowsuit chaffing on the seat. The unscathed snow on the ground was a little bit further from me than I thought, I realized. It stared at me, taunting me. I did not say a single thing, not even after my father caught me by my right arm and pulled me back up into the air, the air that I was forcibly invading with my warm breath, and asked me what the hell I was doing.