hiking-the-pct

I__ begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl__ knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.

I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves.

Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.

Squatting on my bed__fter twelve years of trying and missing, in about two minutes total__ put my own contacts in for the first time. Second try on the right eye, first try on the left. I blinked in the contact, my apartment where I now lived alone and my story coming into focus.

I didn__ know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned. I needed to get to the next trail-town, Mammoth Lakes. There was no one here to save me now.

And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren__, and so anything__reat and terrible__elt possible to me now.

In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles _ the stillness of fresh loss. People__ cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened.

The entire time, he__ only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasn__ the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he wouldn__ have heard me. He__ never responded, not by stopping, not with his words.

It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn__ simply walking__hat I needed to begin respecting my own body__ boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules.First__hen I felt unsafe I__ leave, immediately. The first time, not the tenth time. Not after a hundred red flags smacked in wind violently, clear as trail signs pointing the way to SNAKES. Not after I__ been bitten__he violation. If I wasn__ interested, I would reject the man blatantly.

It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction.

My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.

I began to lust after our conjoining life.

He hadn__ treated me with the love and compassion I wanted, but I was worthy of that love, and someday some boy would have it for me. I hadn__ found it yet, but I would find it soon.

I was going to mean what I said, to be direct and firm.I found my moleskin notebook and on the page behind the pages addressed to Never-Never and my family__wo unsent letters__ wrote: I am the director of my life.

I walked without breaks, slept through nights without waking, inhumanly smooth _ a small machine.

My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn__ looked toward it. I wasn__ lost. I__ always known the way. If I__ only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared.

I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I__ always been told I needed. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I__ ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer.

But I couldn__ say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the truth about her. My thoughts of my mother were wild chaos, I didn__ know how to tell him we__ been enmeshed for as long as I could remember.