aspen-matis

From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn__ walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall__eeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I__ survived rape____ have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.I wrote it.

I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him

My mother overstated the dangers of the world _ invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts_ hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren__ truly real.

The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.

Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity__ sacred thing.

Though I was starved for contact, I didn__ stop to talk to any of these strangers. I had forgotten how to convincingly speak the polite things strangers say to each other.

Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.

I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love.

I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.

He understood. In lovesickness we had found a common language.

I reached into my pack and held something small in the fist I made. __t__ a pocketknife,_ I said, enunciating each letter. I was asserting myself, I__ snapped out of something; he visibly snapped out of something too. I saw it acutely in his dropping posture: doubt in his movement. I said, __he truck works._ And so it did.

Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country__ Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This walk would be my salvation. It had to be.

I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw.

death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End.

After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.

Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness.

I realized that no, no one would actually come to save or even stop me, I had absolutely no choice. The scale tipped: the moment not doing it became more difficult and unbearable than just doing it.

Happy people have everything to give.