Kilimanjaro must have exorcised my demons. I have been talking in my sleep, more like growling. The night after the summit, I kept my roommates awake with my noises. I caught it once or twice, this sleep-noising, just before I drifted to sleep; that liminal space between consciousness when you are drifting into dreams but slightly awake. It was a full coherent conversation in my head that came out as growling sounds. Or howling. The details are sketchy, but based on what my hiking roommates say, that is as close as the explanation gets. While my roommates listened as I re-invented speech from first principles, I slept like a baby. A heavy sleep. I did not wake up even once in the night. Neither did I struggle to sleep, as I had on other days in the mountain.

“Were you having nightmares?” asked one of my roommates.

I do not remember my dreams from these noisy nights. But I don’t wake up scared, or sweating, or with a ‘thank God it was only a dream’. The nights felt like a dark silent night. I did not even notice the mountain wind beating the Horombo Huts like other nights. If slumber land was a forest on those nights, I was in the thickest, most remote part with tall trees that block out the sunlight, such that you cannot tell if it is day or night. It felt like those deep Sunday afternoon naps, multiplied by ten. The kind you wake up feeling like you died and were born again. Except for me, when I woke up, I still felt drowsy. Like the anesthesia was still wearing off. More than a week later, it is still wearing off.

“You will not come back from Kili the same person,” Moulid, The Outdoor Tribe expedition leader, said.

I dismissed it as cliché. This is mountain talk, I told myself. He probably says this to everyone.

He truly probably does say it to everyone. But I get it. I would say it to everyone too. I spent the last days of Kilimanjaro running on low energy, battling altitude and stretching my lungs to their limit. On summit night, I was breathing through my mouth like an old, rickety tractor going up, supporting myself with two hiking poles. Luckily, it was dark and I couldn’t see how far I had to go. I was the enemy who was suffering on that 4km stretch from Kibo Camp to Gilman’s point. I suspect my lungs trapped a pocket of the cold morning air from that hill as a souvenir, to always remember the moment they had to breathe with no air (Queue in ‘No Air’ by Jordin Sparks).

You know the saying that the body keeps a score? How the body stores trauma, like unprocessed energy? No? Yes? I suspect I used up my stored trauma on Kili. I used up my reserve energy, then went even deeper. Everyone was involved, my ancestors living through me, every cell, strand of hair, nails, every ounce of energy without fear or favour. Kili reset my body on a cellular level. I came back both exhausted and rested. Perhaps the better description is that I was exhausted to the point of resting. It is a great contradiction; tired yet rested. When I got home, I took a minute to catch my breath each time I climbed my bed. I just recently regained normal lung function. My body was so tired, my mind had to adjust and calm down too. I feel very calm and grounded now. I am physically unable to rush through things, or panic. I like that feeling, that embodied calmness.

I suppose Moulid was right. I did come back a different person. I am pleasantly surprised by the outcome of those last dizzy days of Kilimanjaro. In retrospect, the experience of dragging myself through that alpine desert to the summit under altitude sickness was otherworldly. It was like my brain and body were pushed beyond sanity and survived. Perhaps I left my demons on that mountain.