Aspen Matis

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.

Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope.

I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.

The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I__ felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn__ move further. No longer. The way I felt about being sexually shamed had changed. Now I was angry that others were trying to shame my sexuality in the first place. I flushed__his time not in shame__ut in rage.