April Littrell
The Off-path
Peeling back mountain’s powdered skin and tossing its infinite molecular extras aside, I, lost in the moment but sure of my path, am nudged gently by a billowy blow of wind just enough to fall into conversation with gravity. I, now lost in my path and so sure of the moment, involuntarily engrave my ass cheeks a meter deep in the silent madness of snow-cover.
The piste panders far above to the stimulus of hard plastics pleasuring it—an alpine love scratch, an exchange of precisely random scrapes. And that’s just how I feel, so precisely, acutely, exactly planted in the serenely chaotic emptiness of the off-path. I am really dug thick into it. Thick into a place not meant to be a place and a place I do not intend to be. A place intended for me. I hoist up and lean forward into nothing, hoping to rejoin with that something of the piste where sure path meets abandon at mountain rim and it doesn’t matter how whatever cascaded cascaded there, to that end.
A brief recollection of swerving off a ski slope in the Austrian Alps. Transcribed from notes taken during a workshop at Writing Retreat Bali.
