Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
Cheryl StrayedDonโt do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to doI donโt think thereโs a single dumbass thing Iโve done in my adult life that I didnโt know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myselfโas I did every damn timeโthe truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, Iโm learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that Iโve still got work to do.
Cheryl StrayedEach night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally Id see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I WOULD be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
Cheryl StrayedIt seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.
Cheryl StrayedI had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest daysโthose very days in which I was naming myselfโI saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.
Cheryl StrayedShe tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she'd made her confession, though she didn't regret having confessed. Perhaps that was what had been wrong with her all along. Now that the lie wasn't between them anymore, maybe she could love him again.
Cheryl Strayed