Cheryl Strayed - Wild

But this was not to be. Lisa called me one day and said she wanted to see me. I’d stayed in touch with her, hanging out for long afternoons at her place, telling her glimmers of what I was up to. As soon as I walked into her house this time, I knew something was up.

“So tell me about heroin,” she demanded.

“Heroin?” I replied lightly. What could I possibly say? It was inexplicable, even to me. “I’m not becoming a junkie, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I offered. I was leaning against her kitchen counter, watching her sweep the floor.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” she said sternly.

“Well, don’t,” I said. I explained it to her as rationally and playfully as I could. It had been only a couple of months. We would stop soon. Joe and I were simply messing around, doing something fun. “It’s summertime!” I exclaimed. “Remember how you suggested that I come here to escape? I’m escaping.” I laughed, though she didn’t laugh along. I reminded her that I’d never had trouble with drugs before; that I drank alcohol with moderation and reserve. I was an experimentalist, I told her. An artist. The kind of woman who said yes instead of no.

She challenged my every statement, questioned my every rationale. She swept and swept and swept the floor as our talk turned into an argument. She eventually became so furious with me that she swatted me with the broom.

I went back to Joe’s and we talked about how Lisa just didn’t understand.

Then, two weeks later, Paul called.

He wanted to see me. Right now. Lisa had told him about Joe and about my using heroin, and he’d immediately driven the seventeen hundred miles straight through from Minneapolis to talk to me. I met him within the hour at Lisa’s apartment. It was a warm, sunny day in late September. I’d turned twenty-six the week before. Joe hadn’t remembered. It was the first birthday of my life when not one person had said happy birthday to me.

“Happy birthday,” said Paul when I walked in the door.

“Thank you,” I said, too formally.

“I meant to call, but I didn’t have your number — I mean, Joe’s.”

I nodded. It was strange to see him. My husband. A phantom from my actual life. The realest person I knew. We sat at the kitchen table with the branches of a fig tree tapping on the window nearby, the broom with which Lisa had struck me propped against the wall.

He said, “You look different. You seem so … How can I say this? You seem like you aren’t here.”

I knew what he meant. The way he looked at me told me everything I’d refused to hear from Lisa. I was different. I wasn’t there. Heroin had made me that way. And yet the idea of giving it up seemed impossible. Looking Paul squarely in the face made me realize that I couldn’t think straight.

“Just tell me why you’re doing this to yourself,” he demanded, his eyes gentle, his face so familiar to me. He reached across the table and took my hands, and we held on to each other, locked eye to eye, tears streaming first down my face, then down his. He wanted me to go home with him that afternoon, he said evenly. Not for a reunion with him but to get away. Not from Joe, but from heroin.

I told him I needed to think. I drove back to Joe’s apartment and sat in the sun on a lawn chair that Joe kept on the sidewalk outside the building. 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. As I sat there a man walked up to me and said his name was Tim. He took my hand and shook it and told me that I could trust him. He asked if I could give him three dollars for diapers, then if he could use my phone inside the apartment, and then if I had change for a five-dollar bill, and on and on in a series of twisting questions and sorry stories that confused and compelled me to stand and pull the last ten dollars I had out of my jeans pocket.

When he saw the money, he took a knife out of his shirt. He held it almost politely to my chest and hissed, “Give me that money, sweetheart.”

I packed my few things, wrote a note to Joe and taped it to the bathroom mirror, and called Paul. When he pulled up to the corner, I got into his car.

I sat in the passenger seat as we drove across the country, feeling my real life present but unattainable. Paul and I fought and cried and shook the car with our rage. We were monstrous in our cruelty and then we talked kindly afterward, shocked at each other and ourselves. We decided that we would get divorced and then that we would not. I hated him and I loved him. With him I felt trapped, branded, held, and beloved. Like a daughter.

“I didn’t ask you to come and get me,” I yelled in the course of one of our arguments. “You came for your own reasons. Just so you could be the big hero.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Why’d you come all this way to get me?” I asked, panting with sorrow.

“Because,” he said, gripping the steering wheel, staring out the windshield into the starry night. “Just because.”

I saw Joe several weeks later, when he came to visit me in Minneapolis. We weren’t a couple anymore, but we immediately started back up with our old ways — getting high every day for the week he was there, having sex a couple of times. But when he left, I was done. With him and with heroin. I hadn’t given it another thought until I was sitting with Aimee in Sioux Falls and I noticed the bizarre being-poked-by-sharp-edges-of-uncrushed-tortilla-chips feeling in my gut.

We left the Mexican restaurant and went to a vast supermarket in search of a pregnancy test. As we walked through the brightly lit store, I silently reasoned with myself that I probably wasn’t pregnant. I’d dodged that bullet so many times — fretted and worried uselessly, imagining pregnancy symptoms so convincing that I was stunned when my period arrived. But now I was twenty-six and wizened by sex; I wasn’t going to fall for another scare.

Back at the motel I shut the bathroom door behind me and peed onto the test stick while Aimee sat on the bed outside. Within moments, two dark blue lines appeared on the test’s tiny pane.

“I’m pregnant,” I said when I came out, tears filling my eyes. Aimee and I reclined on the bed talking about it for an hour, though there was nothing much to say. That I would get an abortion was a fact so apparent it seemed silly to discuss anything else.

It takes four hours to drive from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis. Aimee followed me the next morning in her car, in case my truck broke down again. I drove without listening to the radio, thinking about my pregnancy. It was the size of a grain of rice and yet I could feel it in the deepest, strongest part of me, taking me down, shaking me up, reverberating out. Somewhere in the southwestern farmlands of Minnesota, I burst into tears, crying so hard I could barely steer, and not only for the pregnancy I didn’t want. I was crying over all of it, over the sick mire I’d made of my life since my mother died; over the stupid existence that had become my own. I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail so darkly.

It was then that I remembered that guidebook I’d plucked from a shelf at REI while waiting to buy the shovel a couple of days before. The thought of the photograph of a boulder-strewn lake surrounded by rocky crags and blue sky on its cover seemed to break me open, frank as a fist to the face. I believed I’d only been killing time when I’d picked up the book while standing in line, but now it seemed like something more — a sign. Not only of what I could do, but of what I had to do.

When Aimee and I reached Minneapolis, I waved her off at her exit, but I didn’t go to mine. Instead, I drove to REI and bought The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California and took it back to my apartment and stayed up reading it all night. I read it a dozen times over the next months. I got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water purifier in my kitchen sink. I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be — strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good. And the PCT would make me that way. There, I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.