That's how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts.

I walked all those miles, I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.

Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don't always do the right thing on our way to rightness.

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that tonight that if it hadn't been for Eddie, I wouldn't have found myself on the PCT. And though it was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.

I grew up in northern Minnesota on 40 acres of wooded land 20 miles from the nearest town, and so the wilderness was home. It was not an unsafe place. I had that advantage. But there are so many representations of the wilderness being dangerous. You know, depictions of wild animals attacking people. It's like, "No, we kill those animals in far greater numbers than they kill us."

He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.