He used to say, he wanted to let himself out.  Well here he is, ten years later.  His window’s have closed and can’t be opened again.  Looking through them now, he feels bitter.  He chose an odd path.  When he took the route, the sherpas told him that he was out of his mind.  They said, “Why would you take this trail now?  Start with any of these ones.  You will see much more and your hike will be easier.  They will prepare you for the harder paths, if you choose to go up them later.” He was stubborn though, then.  He had heard of a certain rare flower which could be spotted along his chosen route, and as he had made it a goal of his to study and categorize various plantlife, he could think of no better an idea than to start with the rarest.  His colleagues studied vast amounts of common plants, looking for practical uses that could make them rich.  They would have thought it strange to devote their time to a flower which many believed was in fact merely mythical.  

As he journeyed up his path, its difficulty was immediately apparent.  Half of his energies would be spent in trying to actually make the climb up, to balance himself and dress the small cuts he got as he went along.  His remaining willpower was employed in straining his eyes anxiously in hopes of spotting the flower.  The more he devoted himself to the quest for his plant, the more scratches he would pick up, and the greater the chances that they would become wounds.  He was deathly afraid, though, that if he focused on his ascent up the path, he would miss the flower completely.  

He thinks of those times now, in his little hut on the mountain- every single day.  How he was obsessed, how he was fixated on that flower.  He searches his memory for the day he first read about it, thought it- the day someone first took that little flower and stuck it into his head.   That day he met the flower, the day he took it in gently- how little he knew that it was the same day that the flower would use to capture him.  He knows that if they opened up his brain now, searched it upside down and inside out, they wouldn’t be able to find it.  No sort of lobotomy or brain damage could take that flower out of his head-  but he is sure that  He couldn’t really remember the circumstances or when and where he was (he decided it must’ve been during his childhood) but he could still remember that description.  Those few words, which took off.  Which flew through his mind, morphed into an image still there, as vivid as ever, branded onto