How to Get a Leg Up in Life The First Final Sacrifice (The Second First Cut)(Part 1) How do you get a leg up in life? Start by being in a tough place — the toughest of all tough places — and find yourself there with nothing but your best friend. Where is your tough place? Where might you find yourself with your best friend? Even if we don’t have a best friend, we can imagine one. They’d be just like us — laugh at our jokes, play our games, share our dreams. They’d know the best parts of our lives because they’d live them with us. A best friend. We all know what that is, even if we’ve never truly had one — other than ourselves. The days stretch on, or maybe they don’t. Time is meaningless here, stretched thin between life and death. The wind howls around us, carrying whispers of things I don’t want to hear. Regret. Blame. Accusations that sting like frostbite. “This was supposed to save us,” I murmur, my voice barely audible over the storm. You don’t answer. Your eyes are open, staring at the horizon, but there’s nothing behind them. You’ve stopped speaking. Stopped moving. Stopped being you. And I realize, with a sickening jolt, that we’ve already lost. The mountain has beaten us. It didn’t need avalanches or cliffs to do it. It just needed time. I slump against the snow, the knife still in my hand. The blade is stained with our blood — yours and mine, indistinguishable now. The hunger gnaws at me, but I don’t have the strength to eat. What would be the point? Survival was the goal, but survival without you is… hollow. I look at you, my best friend, the person I trusted most in the world, and I hate you. I hate you for leaving me here, even though I know it wasn’t your fault. I hate you for sacrificing yourself when it didn’t save us, and I hate myself for taking what you offered, for letting you make that choice. I hate the mountain for existing. But most of all, I hate the truth that I’ve known all along: This was always going to end this way.
