A strip of dark cloth sealed away sky, abyss, horizon — everything that might have told him where he stood, or how far he had left to fall.

Sals is crossing a mountain path he cannot see. A blindfold takes away the sky, the horizon, the depth below him. He has no map of where he is. He has no measure of what remains. What he has is a thin stick, and the sound it makes against stone. He listens not for the tap itself, but for the silence where a tap should be. That silence is the only warning the world will give him. So he moves by what he can sense, one small signal at a time, trusting the agreement between the stick and the ground beneath it. Most of us know this kind of walking. Not on a mountain, but inside a life. There are seasons when you cannot see how far you have come or how much is still ahead. You cannot locate yourself by the usual markers. You move anyway. You learn to trust the small things that answer back. You learn to listen for what does not. What is the one small signal, right now, that is still holding between you and the ground?