Lea Page

Word Count 555

The days will all be the same—wake up, pack up, slip out the door before sunrise, walk, and walk some more. Stop to eat. Keep walking. Stop to rest. Keep walking. Find a place for the night. Take a shower, wash your socks and underwear, eat, sleep.

The days will all be different—literally EVERYTHING will be new. 

The choices will be simple. Left, right or straight? The consequences will be immediate. Assume I will get lost.

The most basic task will make me a child: I don’t even know where the grocery store is, business hours remain a mystery, toothpaste and sunscreen are packaged identically and labelled deceptively, and I may need help counting out the change. 

Normally, when someone I don’t know shouts at me from across the street, I am scared. It’s a whole different deal when people—random strangers, old ladies, teenagers, the lot—wish me a buen camino or rush up to tell me that I’ve missed a turn. 

There will be moments when I feel unsafe, but that will be nothing compared to the other unsafe moments in my life, like, say, being a girl or a woman.

I will fall asleep with no effort. I’ll put my head down, and then I’ll wake up nine hours later—no thrashing, no nightmares, no alarm. Just sleep--enough sleep (likely the most foreign thing I will encounter). 

I will think, but I will also not-think. The present will unroll before me as I step into it. I am always stepping into it. 

Goals will recede, as will time, the day of the week, my name, who I am—or thought I was—before I began walking.

I will accept the rain. Or I won’t, and it will still rain. 

Even if I already have a habit of being grateful for simple things—hot running water, a roof over my head when I sleep, clean socks—those will become a proportionally larger and more important part of my day. My gratitude will swell accordingly.

 I will have to rely on other people. I will be acutely aware that they have a choice—they can help me or not—so when they do, I will thank them in their language and mine, adding in my own ad hoc sign language to make sure, and I will store each kindness safely away. That load, as it grows, will have a direct, inverse effect on the weight of the other ones I carry. 

My feet will hurt. No matter my preparation, my shoes, my insoles, my socks, my application of unguents and creams, my taping method or lack thereof, my feet will hurt. And then they will not hurt.

My purpose will be clear: keep walking. And if a grander purpose is more elusive, I can at least say at the end that I have done it, whatever I managed to do. Also, I can get a certificate, if I wait in line at the pilgrim office, and even if I am most emphatically not religious, I might find my eyes inexplicably welling when I say “yes,” to the clerk who asks if mine was a spiritual journey because I might realize I found something, something like peace, and if peace isn’t the same as spirit, well, maybe it should be.

Lea’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Pinch, Stonecoast Journal, Sycamore Review, Pithead Chapel (nominated for Best of Net), High Desert Journal, riverSedge and Slipstream. She is also the author of Parenting in the Here and Now (Floris Books, 2015). She lives in rural Montana with her husband and a small circus of semi-domesticated animals.