You are standing on top of a concrete box on the summit of Mont Blanc in France, describe the moment.

Once you’ve stepped upon a small concrete box marked with an ‘x’ you never expect to feel extraordinary, but here I am not only feeling special but I know the world is too, that everything in this moment is perfect.

Far from being your ordinary concrete box with an ‘x’ on it, this one is 6404m in the air on the tallest mountain on the European continent. It’s on Mont Blanc. I can see glistening glaciers like sugary rivers crackling down the mountain side, tempting many skiers to their fate. Ravines diced and sliced on the surface, as if a giant saw has been cutting away at their surfaces for an eternity.

The kind yet ragged slopes and peaks of the lower mountains resemble the dry skin of a much loved grandparent. Clouds below me, hug to the mountain camouflaged on the snow and fluffy white pines. As they hug I hug, I hold my coat, and I feel warm despite the cold I can see in the faces of others around me. They shuffle towards me trying to nudge me off the box, but here I stand firm, like the mountain, a monolith, unstoppable.

I look up and I see the cosmos. The moon shattering through billowing clouds, the ones that dare go higher than me. Night slowly swallowing this place as day breaks into dusk, dark pine trees form jagged and infinitely shaped silhouettes below me. A constellation of stars can be seen through the moon light, glistening against the blackness of deep space, like dandruff on the shoulders of God.

The small thin cable car wire rattling in the chilling wind, a cut out trail of trees leading to the ant city of Chamonix. The empty trail of white cut out trees leading down the mountain resembles the first cut of a man’s razor, as he begins cutting through the stubble and shaving foam. I can see my car down there, smaller than a grain of sand, a speck among the beach of the car park. The pushing and shoving to stand on the box, the best in the world.

Piercing through the dense ice and snow, gneiss and granite (among other igneous rocks) shape what little solid ground is visible. Twisted, gnawing, and disfigured at grotesque angles, some seem to defy gravity and physics itself.

They seem to grow out of the mountain, reaching out for the sunlight, like starved plants chasing one another for the spot in the canopy. The rocks impeding the climbers who seem to pick the most awkward of routes.

Trails of foot prints scattered here and there, enveloping the mountain in a cocoon of footsteps. They split they join, some go up some down, they meander as if they were a natural irrigation of the mountain, carrying the people down its icy waters to Chamonix below.

Dark shadows linger creeping up from the crevasses like ghosts, slowly engulfing the mountain as day once more becomes night. Murky low light swamps the valleys below like demons at my feet. And the sun descending between the peaks of two distant mountains, that look like mole hills from this height, it looks like a fiery mountain itself, but nothing compared to this, my mountain, my box.

My heart is lifted; you can feel God in the cool, crisp air. My breath bellows and smokes out upon the first snowflakes of the day. My arms are flung out like wings, I feel like I’m flying, I am flying; I’ve conquered the mountain, this gargantuan heap of rock! I can laugh at the brightly coloured skiers below; they don’t know what they’re missing. As they flail downhill avoiding the perfect waters of lac Blanc.

How insignificant and how petty you feel against the brisk chill of these titan rocks. If ever a descent to heaven was possible here it is. This is the true roof of the western world, untouchable, unfathomable, a true God on earth if there ever was one. Then I step down, as the next person takes the concrete podium, their turn for bliss, for perfection. A true divination of what it means to be human.