I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred.
In lovesickness we had found a common language.
It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn’t simply walking—that I needed to begin respecting my own body’s boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. On...
I needed only to allow myself to know what I already knew.
I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself.
The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.
Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country’s Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This wal...
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—two unsent letters—I wrote: I am the directo...
He was sprightly and uncommonly good looking, with a quiet, magnanimous confidence that attracted people. He was my hero, too, and I listened to him. He gave me lots of wise advice. He told me to put...
It felt amazing to make visible my boundaries.The rumors dissipated, then changed. Eventually I turned down enough men that I became the girl who turned down men.
I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I neede...
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.
I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a child. How lucky he felt to be the one to have discovered me, to have me. I wanted him to look at me li...
Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.
Happy people have everything to give.
But I couldn’t 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’t know how to tell him we’d been enmeshe...
I began to lust after our conjoining life.
From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn’t walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes...
I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw.
