Prayer Flags and Yaks

I went as high as a visa and a decent set of lungs would allow, chasing a hunch about altitude that I cannot yet justify to anyone who asks what it is for. The plateau does something specific to attention - thinner air, slower thought, a strange clarity that arrives right before the headache does.

The yaks were unbothered by all of this, which felt like the correct response. The prayer flags mark passes and thresholds, places where something changes, and I kept thinking, uselessly, about other kinds of thresholds - the ones a body crosses knowing it will come back different, if it comes back at all.

I have three different research threads going at once right now and no idea which one is actually a book. This might be the physiology chapter of something about orbit and endurance. It might be nothing. I am carrying it in my inner ear either way.