An intensely painful stomach ache kept me awake that night. Every time I lay down, my head spun and nausea swelled in my throat. I ran from the tent to the portable toilet a handful of times. I desperately wanted to vomit. And I tried. But I couldn't. We were scheduled to have five hours of sleep that night, but I managed to get only an hour and a half. I'd felt so strong, almost invincible up to this point. This is who I am—I compete and I finish. But my pain was so powerful that I questioned myself and if I could make it. It was jarring. And embarrassing. As the camp started to come alive just before midnight, I told Mussa my stomach hurt. He was our leader and he was the expert—I was hoping for sympathy and a solution. But I got neither. He looked at me almost blankly and said, “Get in line, you’re going up.”

Time is different in Africa. It moves slower and faster at the same time. While we'd only been with Mussa for six days, my connection with him felt like it spanned our lifetimes. We started each morning chatting before breakfast or competing on difficult yoga poses. Then we'd spend the next six or eight hours hiking, joking, and sharing stories. He carried my phone every day, and back at camp each evening I would look through the pictures he'd commissioned—pictures and videos of him and me climbing, jumping into the air, looking out into the distance. Mussa was a vacation within my vacation. He had a way about him that I couldn’t get enough of. He was patient and soft-spoken. He was slow and methodical about sharing, although he was inquisitive about my life and my dreams and hung on to every detail. He was quietly confident and fiercely funny without even trying. And he was beautiful. I wondered what he was thinking about me, if he was even thinking about me. Anyway, I was surprised when he dismissed my plea.  

He looked me over, placed his hat on my head and assigned us in line order immediately behind him: me, Nichole, Lindsey, Laurene, then Rachel. And at midnight we set off.  

Mussa told us it would be a six hour climb and that we would stop every hour. My watch had died after the first day, so I had to keep track of the stops in my head and try to align them with what I thought the time was. After a few stops, when I realized we had probably already been climbing for close to six hours and the end was nowhere in sight, my anxiety peaked. It was the middle of the night, pitch black, and I was climbing up a sheet of ice. My stomach was in knots and I wanted to sleep more than I wanted to breathe. I was scared. And I am almost never scared. I am the girl who harnesses her fear and uses it as fuel to power through even the most challenging times. Or at least I thought I was. The altitude was exposing an internal crevasse where my fear of failure and of the embarrassment of my failures had been buried. I didn’t know what else to do so I fell on my knees in the snow and I cried. Mussa pulled me up and we kept hiking—“We’re doing good,” he told me gently. 

We continued walking and every so often I would ask Mussa how much longer. Each time, he said, "Thirty more minutes." Each time, I counted out thirty minutes in my head. Each time, he lied. Hours passed and although I felt physically fine to continue, I was struggling to stay awake. Wanting just a few minutes of sleep, I leaned my body into Mussa's, lay my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes. His energy instantly put me at ease. It was the first time I'd touched him and it felt like I was dreaming. Inebriated on altitude, I was still sober enough to know what I was doing. For three days I'd been wondering what Mussa thought of me. Did his heart jump every time he saw me? Did he look for reasons to talk to me? Did he position me directly behind him because he wanted to be close to me? Had he wanted me to touch him? Had he wanted to touch me? I thought I might find my answers in this moment. But I didn’t. He let me rest on his shoulder for only a few seconds—we had to keep climbing, he said.  

Dizzy and disoriented though, I had to slow down. Mussa slowed down too, silently staying just a few steps ahead of me. I’d been behind him most of this hike and had been fascinated with watching him walk—I’d taken several videos of just his legs, walking. All week that had been enough to keep me questing after him, but I needed more now. I needed him to say something to me.

“Sing me a song, Mussa.”

“Mmmmh.”

“That song I like.”

He whispered, slowing down the pace of the song to match the pace of our movement, “Jambo, jambo bwana. Habari gani. Mzuri sana.”

He’d been singing this song since our first day together. I didn’t know what the words meant but hearing him say them assured me and took my mind off the work of walking. When we reached the top of the hill where the rest of the group was waiting, I breathed easier and rejoiced, believing I had conquered my fear and the mountain. But triumph was snatched from me when they explained that this was a point, not the peak. There was more hiking to do. There was more hiking to do? THERE WAS MORE HIKING TO DO?! As my fears echoed and avalanched inside my head, I collapsed in the snow again.

The other girls continued hiking as Mussa lifted me from the ground once more. "It’s just over one more rock, you can do it," he said as if he was responding to the chaos inside my mind.

I hadn’t known I would need an anchor, but here he was. As we continued walking, he drew closer to me and wrapped his arm around mine. As I leaned into him this time, his body welcomed me.

"I'm sleeping," I told him.

"You are?"

"Yes, and I'm dreaming right now."

"Oh, am I there?"

"Yes."

"Is it a good dream?"

"Yes."

"What are we doing?"

"We're walking in the snow."

"Ooooh, I like that," he smiled, as he untangled our arms and pressed his palm into mine. 

We walked hand in hand like it was our fifth date—still new enough to be giddy and coy, yet established enough to be comfortably attached to one another. We talked about what might have happened if we had met when we were younger. I think we’d have screwed it up—the way people do when they are young and insecure and don’t know what they want or what they need, let alone what they have to offer to another human being. He disagreed. He’d have seen me and he’d have known.

There was no one else in our world now. Alone on the mountain, we flirted with the future. It was effortless. It was enchanting. It was exquisite. It was ephemeral because as we crested the hill and the rest of the group saw us holding hands, his arm stiffened. He is an experienced guide, but more than that he is a professional. Even merely giving the appearance that you are romantically involved with or pursuing a client while you are still on the mountain is anything but professional in his opinion. And as the leader of our group, his job was to take care of all of us and make sure we all summitted, but somehow he was focused only on me. He said nothing but I knew worry was circling his mind. And I understood his fear—this was his livelihood and his reputation and would continue to be long after I was gone. Maybe I wanted to protect him the way he'd protected me for the last six days. Or maybe I wanted to pull away from him before he pulled away from me, because that’s how relationships usually go for me. Either way, I knew I had to release him, along with any notion that we could ever be anything other than a guide and his client, or that he’d ever wanted anything more than that with me in the first place. I glanced peripherally at him one last time as I gathered my resolve and prepared to suppress my feelings of disappointment and rejection. But he was right—he had seen me and he knew. He looked down at our hands as if to make sure they were still there, still wrapped together, and before I could flee, he bolted his hand into mine and continued to march with me toward the waiting group—not caring who saw or what they thought.

Being close to Mussa and finally knowing how he felt had briefly hidden my mountain sickness, but as we started moving again, toward the peak, I struggled to walk in a straight line. Still stuck by my side, Mussa knew I was near my breaking point. "I am not going to give up on you, Ashlie, and I am not going to let you give up on yourself." He later told me that a lot of guides would have seen a girl with an inhaler and would’ve immediately counted her out, “But when I met you a week ago, I asked you what you wanted and you told me you wanted to summit—and I want you to summit.”

I asked him why he cared so much.

“You’re my friend, Ashlie. I feel like I’ve known you for fifteen years…I’m not letting you down.”

And he hasn't.

-Ashlie Alaman

Growing up, Ashlie Alaman wanted to be a lawyer or a journalist. Although she ended up being a lawyer, the desire to write never left her. After several years of reading memoir after memoir, and in an effort to make sense of her own jumbled landscape, Ashlie began writing and is currently working on a collection of personal essays, which includes Falling In Love.