July 14
I woke up really late, and decided to go for a walk around 10:30. I stopped at a coffee shop and then went down to the beach and walked along the water watching the surfers. I walked several miles, only 5. I feel a little bit lazy. How funny that a 5 mile walk feels like nothing to me.
I walked through part of Golden Gate Park. I didn’t know where or if there would be any bathrooms, so I walked off the trail into some bushes and peed. I could tell that people had used to live there, in the bushes, and had been forcibly removed at some point. I walked out of the trees back to the trail. I was wearing my rain jacket which is pretty dirty at this point. A woman was standing there with her dog and gave me a look like I was doing something wrong, like I was somewhere that I shouldn’t be. But I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done almost every day for the last 3 months.
I walked further down the beach to a Safeway and bought a salad, and some fruit and went back to the beach to eat my lunch. I just sat in the sand, on my already dirty rain jacket.
It’s cold here. It’s foggy and the sun isn’t out. I wore my leggings, my new T-shirt under my sweatshirt and rain jacket. It was the perfect outfit to be comfortable in this weather.
I have a horrible headache. My neck hurts, which ironically hasn’t hurt this much since before I started the trail. It’s a stress thing. It’s a nervous system thing. Ironically, carrying a 30+ pound backpack every single day for miles on end for months, and sleeping on the ground never caused pain like this. This is pure stress.
I’m incredibly stressed to go home. I’m afraid to lose the person that I was on the trail. The one who started believing in the magic of the trail – that the trail provides, that people are good and kind, that maybe there’s mountain gods and things that we don’t understand in the world, maybe there’s magic in the rivers, that I am capable of climbing over some of the highest mountain passes in the country covered in snow completely by myself. I don’t want to lose that part of myself, and I’m terrified that going home means doing just that.
How do I hold on to myself? the PCT version of myself?
The motel doesnt have laundry and I don’t feel like going to a laundromat especially because I now have so few clothes that I don’t even really have anything to wear while I’m doing laundry, so I washed my clothes in the bathtub with some laundry leaves.
I watched some movies on Netflix on my phone and went to bed, waking up several times. It don’t sleep well in hotels, it’s not really my bed. I want to be home. But where is that now exactly?
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