I was a hundred feet above the ground, clinging. In the distance, Joshua trees saluted the golden hour’s infinity with their cheerful punk spikes and victorious fringed limbs, but all I could see was a faint rose tinge on the granite wall inches from my face.

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The rope connecting me to my climbing partner below dangled from my harness like a wet noodle. It would only go taut and hold me if I fell, but first, I’d fall a distance—much farther than I wanted to fall. When I looked down at my feet to find the next foothold, the wind blew my hair into my eyes and mouth.

“Help me,” I whispered, or more like prayed.

A voice spoke inside my head. Not God’s—mine.

No one is coming to save you, it said. You got yourself into this, and you must get yourself out. There is no God. There is only gravity, dirt, rock, and sky. The crack was within sight, but not within reach. The crack would make me safe. I could put my hands in the crack, and they would stay there. I could jam my toes in the crack and stand up on my feet. I could put a metal piece of protective gear in the crack, and make sure it was stuck there, and clip the rope knotted between my belly and groin to it.

All that mattered was just holding on.

Then, if I fell, I would not fall so far.

But until I got there, all there was to hold on to was a slight vertical bump, like a doorjamb. It was like trying to hold yourself on a wall by pinching the edges of a piece of molding.

I couldn’t hold on much longer. My rubber-shod toes were pressed on little nubs the size of chicken nuggets. (If I were a better climber, the bumps would be no wider than dimes.) Soon, my legs would start to shake and my fingers would start to slip.

I could not stay where I was. I had to make a move.

I looked longingly at the crack above. The voices of my mentors told me what to do.

“Place your feet with intention,” said Glenn, with his Deadhead ponytail and Lennon glasses and sinews never obscured by sleeves.

“Make a plan for your feet,” said Flora, in her kind and measured scientist voice.

“Just hold on!” chuckled Fred, in his SoCal drawl, miming with his huge, strong fingers. “You’d be surprised how much your body wants to live.” Sometimes, when I climbed, I heard other voices—like my last real boyfriend’s, a pathological liar who had threatened to decapitate me—so I pulled on the rock with the strength of someone who could kill him first. Now, clinging on, things people had said to me no longer mattered.

What was true and what was not no longer mattered. Love and trust did not matter, marriage and babies did not matter. All that mattered was just holding on.

I didn’t need a ring or a house or even a van. I was closer to forty than thirty, but at this exact moment, I didn’t need to figure out how to finally achieve everything that had thus far eluded me, nor make peace with not having and maybe never getting anything my heart desired. This was the one place in the world where sorrow and shame couldn’t reach me. All I needed, and all I wanted, was to claw myself six feet higher and jam my hand in the crack.

There, was my only thought. Now.

My mind was quiet while my brain calculated. Then it told my body: Go.

I breathed in and reached up. I breathed out and placed my foot with intention. Each time my fingers grasped a new bump or dent or wrinkle or edge, I thought only: Yes.

Then I arrived. It was just a broken place, with space inside its darkness.

I never let any man see me cry, but I could let the rock see.

I sank my fingers into the crack until they locked in place. I twisted my foot into it, until the whole toe was jammed, unfurled myself, and stood tall. I grabbed a piece of metal protective gear from my harness, slotted it into the crack, pulled up the rope from between my legs, and attached myself to the wall.

I tugged on the piece. It was good. I was safe.

I pressed my cheek against the rock’s scratchy face, looking back over my shoulder at all the things I climbed to escape—the compendium of lonely weekends and holidays, the persistent longing for love and sex and safety and babies that was only getting louder and harder to bear, the bad mess I always made of it all. Just then, the sun fell below the horizon. I hugged the rock with my one free arm and wept.

I never let any man see me cry, but I could let the rock see. The rock wasn’t human. It couldn’t love me. I didn’t have to try to make it. I didn’t even have to let it. I didn’t have to be afraid of what it might do to me, in the name of love. Everything that happened here was something I had done, myself.

Things would get better now, they had to. Eventually, even the terse descriptions in climbing guidebooks always said, “The difficulties ease.” 

“Emily?” shouted my belayer, holding the rope down below. “Everything all right?”

“Fine!” I shouted back. “Climbing!”

I took a ragged breath, inhaling the cold, clean scent of the wall.

Then I charged up the crack in perfect rhythm, karate-chopping one hand and then the other, twisting one foot, then the other, until I was almost vertically walking. “Swimming up stone,” I’d once heard it called. I kept climbing until I didn’t need to use my hands anymore. The rock flattened out and became something like ground beneath my feet. I howled with joy and relief, then looked for a place to build an anchor.

Down on the ground, it was hard to connect, hard to attach, hard to untangle, hard to let go. But up here, I understood.

“Make it good,” Fred always said, about the colorful metal protective gear I had to place correctly in the rock myself, the only thing that would catch me if I fell. Up here, I could make it good.

There was blood on my hands, but I felt no pain. I built a bomber anchor just like I’d been taught and clipped my belay device to it, threading it with the rope that would hold my partner’s life, just as moments ago, they had held mine. Checking everything twice, I yelled down, “On belay!” and watched the setting sun paint the desert sky, grinning through my tears as I pulled up the rope I had hung.

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Turn to Stone by Emily Meg Weinstein is available from Simon Element, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.