These Are the Days that Must Happen to You

If sadness is something that I have to feel, I would like to make it into something remarkable. If I needed to stay awake for four hours last night, wrestling with a physical heartache, then at least this morning I took myself hiking in the forest, through the trees and mud. It is the best I can do. And now, I feel better.

Although there is still fog and clouds moving across the sky, the sun has found us again in Big Sur and I feel a little bit more like my feet are on the ground. The longest night of the year has passed, and there will only be more light from here forward. Over a month ago, I told my friend Lindsay that I was ready for it to rain here; that I wanted it to rain so I could sink further into the ground. I do not feel settled, but I do feel calm, stable, somehow rooted even if I am still anxious at times, and mysteriously heartbroken.

I am good at thinking about things. I am good at being cerebral, problem-solving, seeing the many sides of a situation. More than once, friends have told me that they often do not know how to support me or offer advice in conversation because I have already dissected the situation so thoroughly. There must be something about seeing a situation and breaking it apart (what parts do I own, what part is someone or something else responsible, etc.) that is comforting to me. Still, it seems that this practice, however it came to be in my life, keeps me from fully feeling.

Not surprisingly, it is in situations where I am hurt that I tend to dissect the most. Maybe I am trying to see if there is a way out of actually feeling the hurt, if I can find a loop hole where I am to blame instead of any other person or thing actively hurting or disappointing me. If I can take responsibility, then I can get myself out of what I got myself into.

But then, there are moments like last night, when the whole thing I’ve been so carefully dissecting and asking questions about (what to do in my life, what to do with a man who has come toward me and then exited the scene for a whole myriad of unexplainable reasons, what is directing me, what do I believe in, what do I want, what wounds haven’t healed) --- when all of it explodes into a real emotion. It felt like an illness that was ravishing my body. I was sick to my stomach, legs curled in, on my side, under all the covers. Soon, it was as if this nausea transformed into a pulsing ache in my chest, just left of center. My heart was beating audibly, as if I could feel my chest thump against the mattress and bounce back, pounding, pounding. This was a backload of hurt that made the current circumstance shrink in its magnitude. I begged to fall asleep. There was no making sense of this moment, so I wanted out of it.

It was a moment that lasted hours and too long. A month and half ago, when the heartache connected to the man began, I went to a holistic pharmacy and purchased a sleep aid for the first time in my life. I also bought aromatherapy tea lights that are suppose to calm and aid in sleep as well. I’ve learned a lot since my last heartbreak, and I am not too proud to hold out hope that there are medicinal products to help balance me out. So eventually, thanks to the melatonin, I fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until almost nine o’clock this morning.

For me, there is only one thing to do when my mind has failed me and my heart is breaking, and that is to do something physical. A contemplative walk on the ranch or at the beach wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to climb a mountain, run up steep sections until I had to stop and catch my breath.  I slipped on some leggings and my trail running shoes, and drove down our dirt road and the half-mile on Highway One to the Big Sur Station trailhead. I pulled out my map as I finished my cup of coffee. I zipped up my rain jacket and tucked my car key in the pocket.

I chatted with two guys a few years younger than me about trail conditions. They were hiking-in ten miles or so to a natural hot spring along the Big Sur River, a place I hiked to in mid-October. They asked about stream crossings, and I could only tell them how much it had rained in the last week, and that the levels were sure to be high and to be cautious. As I started down the trail, I kept thinking about them, wondering if I should turn around, check if they were confident in whatever stream crossing techniques they knew, without being patronizing, just make sure they knew enough to be alright. I didn’t need a drowned 22-year-old in my neighborhood forest on my conscious. I decided I was over-reacting and I realized that I would be coming back the same way I was going out, so I was sure to meet them again.

I was walking fast, running up and down hills on the trail. The rain stopped. I warmed up and tied my jacket around my waist and folded my shirt up to expose my middle. I was not thinking about anything once I decided to leave the 22-year-olds in the parking lot to fend for themselves. I was breathing in the cool air near the river and between the damp redwoods. The river was a soundtrack, full and getting louder as I climbed while its path grew steeper through the middle of the canyon.

I left my heartache in the chicken coop. I left it in the longest night of the year, with the full moon, and a sky too heavy with rain to know the moon was there at all. Now, I am sweating and counting banana slugs. Now, I am watching the fog roll through the middle of the canyon. Now, I am going further into the forest, just to see what’s around the next curve in the trail, wishing I had no reason to ever turn around.

It is almost 11:30 and I have to be somewhere by 1:00. I salute the Ventana Wilderness, the Los Padres National Forest, and all the miles of trails I didn’t get to yet. I say thank you to the Big Sur River, to the fog hiding the bellies of the peaks, to the mud splattered on my exposed calves. I turn around, pleased.

At the only stream crossing in the section of trail I walked, is where I meet the 22-year-olds. They are climbing the hill toward me, seeming to have successfully crossed as they were still fully dressed and not soaking wet, and all accounted for. I stand to the side to let them past.

“How’s it going?” I ask, deciding that their eagerness should not be mistaken for naïveté.

“Well, we made it out of the parking lot finally,” the one in the lead answers.

“Congratulations. That can be the hardest part.”