Lady pranced and scraped her front hooves on the ice and then lowered her head and looked at us. I inhaled sharply and Leif fired the gun.
It’s really condescending to tell you how young you are. It’s even inaccurate. Some of you who are graduating from college are not young. Some of you are older than me. But to those of you new college graduates who are indeed young, the old new college graduates will back me up on this: you are so goddamned young. Which means about eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself will over time prove to be false.
I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother. I pushed the fact of it away with everything in me. I couldn’t let myself believe it then and there in that elevator and also go on breathing, so I let myself believe other things instead.
The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.
But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I really did have only one boot.
Yes. I get to do this. I get to waste my life. I get to be junk.
Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed.
You know how alchoholics who go to AA are always using that phrase “one day at a time”? They say that because to say “I will never drink again” is just too damn much. It’s big an hard and bound to fail.
True intimacy isn’t a psychodrama. It isn’t the “highest highs and lowest lows”. It’s communion and mellow compatibility. It’s friendship and mutual respect.
Every evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from the vastness itself.
I walked through the spiderwebs, feeling them like magic on my face.
Heroin had made me dumb and distant from myself. A thought would form and then evaporate. I could not quite get ahold of my mind, even when I wasn’t high.
The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life.
There’s a saying about drug addicts that they stop maturing emotionally at the age they start using, and I’ve known enough addicts to believe this to be true enough. I think the same thing can happen in longtime monogamy. Perhaps some of your limited interpretations about what it means to say the word “love” are left over from what you thought it meant all those years ago...
Because no matter how experimental he is, his life isn’t an experiment.
For some of you, those things have already happened.
Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.
Even if you get the dream, you don’t know if it will stay true.
So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless.
There’s a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you’ll be comforted to hear that you’re not alone.