Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I’m a slow walker, but I never walk back

I wasn’t worried about crossing the line anymore

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place

Fuck them.
That was my prayer: Fuckthemfuckthemfuckthem.

Each day I felt as if I were looking up from the bottom of a deep well.

It didn’t matter whether someone came along anyway. I was in this alone.

Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed.

“I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free

before I pitched my boot over the edge of that mountain, I’d been pitching