"Mountains" by Nicole L

I remember mountains. More specifically, I remember the view of mountains from the kitchen window, the front door of my apartment, and now, my stunted backyard. They've always been there. It's just funny how I’ve started noticing them now.

When I was little, mountains were always a little surreal to me. They were big and far away, much like giraffes and elephants. The only people I knew who lived on mountains were from fairy tales— Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks. The mountains themselves just existed somewhere beyond the horizon, big and bright and beautiful, and I was never really sure if they were real.

Something like this, I suppose, which I took from Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, one of my favorite childhood films. When the mountains were particularly majestic-looking, I imagined a Bob Ross painting.

It sounds silly, but sometimes, I imagined they were just a hologram, that if I drove toward them, they would disappear around me like a mist. I wondered what was behind them. According to my fifth grade geography teacher, the Mojave Desert. But was it really though? I couldn't bring myself to believe that something as mysterious as mountains hid plain old desert behind it.

When I started reading The Chronicles of Narnia in third grade, I imagined something more along the lines of this, never mind the fact that Southern California is unbearably dry, with no inland seas to speak of.

Within the sphere of suburbia, they were the guardians of my world, like the walls of a snow globe, holding back whatever horrors lurked in The Real World. They were the edges of my earth, but through the years, it seems as though this boundary is fading. Each time I look at them, they inch a bit closer, until I can almost see them living across the street, a five-minute walk away. Their once vibrant colors have dulled to gritty blue-grey and on some mornings, they are translucent, a hazy smear on the sky's canvas. From experience, I know this is impossible: Excluding sudden geological events, mountains do not move, and even if they did, colors deepen in value as distance decreases.

Maybe my windows are dirty. (They probably are.) Maybe the air quality has decreased. (It probably has.) Maybe I am remembering things differently. (I probably am.)

Even so, I can’t help but feel an indefinable sense of loss, as though the mountains that I’ve only ever paid attention to in passing reflect some fundamental change in myself. Moreover, because this is supposed to be a personal narrative, I’m practically required to extrapolate some deeper meaning from this, an inconclusive conclusion about childhood innocence or the transient nature of beauty.

As much as I love Calvin and Hobbes, I’m with Calvin’s dad on this one. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, and a story can be relevant without shoehorning a lesson that isn’t there.

The most obvious and non-sentimental answer would be my worsened eyesight. My friend and family never cease to give me grief about my impending blindness whenever I fail to find something that is sitting in front of me. Therefore, it should come as no surprise when I am now unable to find the mountains that I once remembered. Perhaps I am blind to them now because my severe myopia renders almost everything blurry if it is not within twelve inches of my face.

Plausible as this explanation may be, I nonetheless reject it on the grounds of being boring. I refuse to accept that the objects of my casual curiosity could be reduced to a reason as stale and unoriginal as myopia.

On the other side of the spectrum, the most exciting possibility is that my childhood self was right: Mountains do exist solely in National Geographic covers and fairy tales, which would raise many disturbing questions about the purpose of fake mountains— and in the San Gabriel Valley, no less.

I mean, truly. Look at this picture and tell me that it wasn’t staged or edited in some way. How can such breathtaking beauty exist in real life? These mountains were made for gods and the greedy eyes of real estate developers, not us.

As much as I am a proponent of lateral thinking, I must discard this suggestion as well. Outlandish conspiracy theories aside, it would be a disservice to suffocate my mountains under the ilk of tinfoil men, not when the mountains themselves have a legacy of some sixty-five million years. Although my younger self would criticize my lack of imagination, I am willing to take the risk. Perhaps, this too is a sign of growing up, that I can dismiss theories based on scientific integrity.

Rather than some change in me or the mountains, maybe the answer lies in us both, as it is so often the case. I concede that I am no longer the child that I once was. Maybe, in order to grow up, I left behind more than I thought I did. Maybe, during the rush, I missed the change in the mountains themselves. Or, maybe it is just the tendency for nostalgia to tint the past with rose-colored lenses.