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Here is a portrait of me 4 days before my 3-year sober anniversary: I am on a Delta flight to Paris and feel a little bit like setting myself on fire. I cannot sleep on planes and so I am tired and hungry but what I really am is anxious, and I can feel something breaking. Because something has been breaking for months now. The goal, I tell myself, is not to cry in public; the goal is to make it to Montparnasse and cry, if I must, in the cemetery in front of the jewel-kissed graves of existentialists. “Makes sense; she must just really care about the Second Sex,” they might say. I do not cry. I buy a pack of Gauloises and a coffee, and then I check into my little hotel and try to sleep off a panic attack. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I am not even in my body.
I was in Paris because I needed to get to St. Jean Pied-de-Port to start the Camino Frances. After a wrong train/coach/town, I made it to the starting point. At dinner at the albergue, we were asked to go around and state our Camino goal in a few words. What might be the book title for your Camino journey? I wasn’t exactly sure why I was there except that I had stopped drinking 3-years ago, and I naively thought this would solve all the problems in my life but this was not something I was about to announce to an international group of strangers. I stood up and said “my title would be The Prayer I Can Make.” I sat down and let everyone assume I was on a true Catholic pilgrimage. What I was praying for then was a benzodiazepine.
But when I said “The Prayer I Can Make” I meant an inversion of Jane Mead’s “Concerning the Prayer I Cannot Make.” I think everything I felt right then is in that poem. This is a pilgrimage about poetry. About loneliness. I did not pray. I do not know how. When we were asked for a moment of silence, I told God, “I do not know what to pray for anymore but I promise to pay attention.”
I walked with some new friends to Orisson, a small hamlet in the Pyrenees. It was all rain and mist over the green mountains, brambles of fairy tale trees. I met a woman from Brazil, and we spoke about Gaston Bachelard, Angels in America, Brazilian and American politics, beautiful buildings, climate change, the important things. At night, the rain came down like cold, coarse sugar and I stood with my new friends. One wanted to know about my drinking. He wanted to know about my ghost. I studied a tree in the fog with no leaves. We stared at each other for a long time, the tree and I, and I felt like I was in a movie, by which I meant I knew where to put the camera. Something clicked.
There was a time in my life when given the choice between love and writing, I would have chosen writing.
I think Carson McCullers would have really gotten me. And that’s all I will say about that.
The panic attack lifted in Pamplona. I discovered a new love for electrolytes.
I walked alone over the Alto del Perdón. It was all thick fog and pouring rain. The kind of rain that turns trails into rivers. I reminded myself I had done a hike like this once in Utah. I hiked through the streams. I got blisters. There was only one way to go and that was up. Afterwards, my friend told me, “now you’ve been forgiven.” But I was not thinking about forgiveness that day. I was thinking about faith. What I want is the sublime. I want the feeling of God breathing down my neck.
We walked and we walked and we walked and we stopped for breakfast three times per day, and by noon each day, I felt nothing. I have never had so few thoughts, and it makes sense to me why people exercise.
Somewhere outside of Los Arcos, I tried to tell my new Irish friend that I had a 4-day panic attack but now I didn’t even care if I died alone. Except I didn’t say this because I started laughing hysterically, and I could not stop. “I get why people cry in Santiago,” he said. “It’s delirium.” I did not stop laughing for the next three weeks.
Sometimes I think about my hurt feelings, but then I say, I DON’T EVEN CARE! I say, IT IS WHAT IT IS!
My new friends love art. They really love it. And I remembered that I love it, too. Among other things, I remembered that I love writing, history, philosophy, having a community, good books. I love to travel and attempt to speak new languages (even if I cannot roll my “r”s). When I open my mouth, sometimes French comes out. Sometimes Spanish. It’s anyone’s guess.
I say: I am bored to tears thinking about loneliness. I am so bored thinking about my want. There are infinite things that are more interesting: the smell of edible chestnuts, the wild fennel, the sound of cowbells, the hundreds of altar cherubs. The saints holding out their own heads. The saint offering her breasts on a platter.
I listen in the fog and then out of nowhere: Andalusians.
A gate in the mountain becomes a white house. A round hay bale transforms into a yellow horse.
I have three outfits, a cheap red poncho, the wrong shoes, a piece of disappearing soap, four people with whom to split laundry, and two packages of Haribo at any given time.
At the cathedral in León, I cannot stop studying the round stained glass. The way you look up, look up, look up, and even if my gods are in the mountains, I know holiness when I see it. Architects and artists and builders who dedicated their whole lives to one single thing.
My friend had dreams of a black dog. We watched a black storm roll across the Meseta. I thought: goddamn, isn’t it great to be alive? I thought: I must throw away this red poncho. After the storm, I sat on my bed with my feet in the air, too tired to roll over.
When I think of depression and addiction, I think of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Sons.” It is one of my all-time favorite paintings.
For a whole month, I walked, did laundry, talked about art, ate pork, wrote, drank coffee. I did not doomscroll. I did not constantly feel like the world was ending. I had a Camino family who loved me as much as I loved them.
I wish I could walk 500 miles forever.
At the end of my journey, I took the train to Madrid. It is the first time I was transported by anything besides my own two legs in over a month. But I was in Madrid for one reason and that was to see Goya. My one true love. In his paintings, there are dogs everywhere.
If I am to be alone and lonely, let me paint it the style of Spanish Romanticism. Let me go over every mountain in torrential rain. I am ok if my feet bleed. I do not have to be haunted forever.
Let me have best friends to share it with. Let us bond over feet. Let’s stop for another coffee. Let’s split a bar of chocolate and scream about postmodernism. I’ll share my leukotape. Buy me another alcohol-free beer. I’ll get the next round.
“You think you know yourself?” my Brazilian friend tells me. “No. Not until you dance flamenco.”
I think I will start dancing again. I think I will read all the existentialism. I think I will drop out of the literary scene entirely.
I think I will let go of the narrative.
Back in the states, I am not sure what to do with myself. I walk circles around the neighborhood. I drive to the archives in a different state. I drive 100mph back to Boise and go straight to the library and fill my arms with Sartre, Freud, and Jung. I spend too much money on embroidery thread. I buy a sketchbook and colored pencils and plan to draw a hundred pages of trees.
I am learning Portugese. I can say “I have a dog and I do not have a house.” I think this will take me far.
I don’t know what happens next. I am still trying to pay attention.
I think it is no small miracle the way people come into our lives. I felt like I knew my Camino friends my whole life. “I think you are someone who is always looking for something. That’s not a bad thing,” my Australian friend told me. “Unbecoming but ain’t that the truth,” I said.
There is a picture of me walking through the doors of the train station leaving Santiago. I don’t look back but I do get on the right train.
I think I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
What does one do with all this beauty? I swallow it up like I swallow my own flesh and blood. I eat it all knowing I am never going to be full.