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Things I’ll Leave Behind on the Camino de Santiago

Sadie Wells

May 25, 2025 86 comments

My pinky toenail.

18 inches of hair.

A pile of unnecessary items, neatly stacked on a bed in Vila do Conde—things I needed to stop lugging around.

Shame. All of it. Every last drop. Ireallyneed to stop lugging that around.

My fear of vulnerability.

My need to try to match someone else’s pace or follow someone else’s path.

My obsession with time, and with beingtoo late.

My negative self-talk.

My need to have all the answers.

My heart. Is that a clichéd thing to say? Oh well. I’m a cliché.

TWENTY-EIGHTSANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, SPAINMonday, May 26, 2025

Sadie

It’s still dark outside when Inez has us wake up for our final day of walking. In fifteen miles, we will arrive in Santiago de Compostela.

I move tiredly around the hotel room, doing my morning stretches for the last time, putting on my wool socks for the last time, repacking my bag for the last time. It’s the same routine I’ve done for fourteen days, but it feels wrong this morning, because I’m not doing the routine alongside Mal.

Vera’s and Ari’s noises are different. Vera’s alarm is some loud techno bleating sound, and Ari turns on the overhead lighting as soon as she’s awake. Vera wants to talk about the plan for the day, and Ari hogs the bathroom, and I keep bumping into both of them.

Fourteen days. Fourteen days of Mal sleeping in until the last minute, fourteen days of her water bottle clanging against the too-shallow sink as she tries to fill it for the day, fourteen days of her swift, purposeful movements. Fourteen days of smelling her deodorant and thinking about spring. Those few precious mornings where I woke up in her arms.

And now it’s over.

It was always going to end in Santiago, in the same way our trek was always going to end there too.

I got what I wanted out of the arrangement. I got to experience the adolescence I missed out on. I cut off my hair and got a tattoo; I learned to flirt, learned what it feels like to have a crush. I had my first kiss with a woman. I had sex. I learned about what I want and how to ask for it. I feel at home in my body for the first time in thirty-five years, and when I look in the mirror, I see myself. A version of myself with short hair and a tattoo, but myself, nonetheless.

I’ve come out to seven more people than I was out to at the start of this trip, and when I return to Seattle, I will come out to my family, even if I don’t have the perfect words.

So why do I still feel so unsatisfied?

Maybe because I went and did the most adolescent thing of all: I thought my first love might be my forever love. I went full Juliet, full Bella Swan, full teenage-girl-cliché and fell in love with someone I’d known for all of five minutes.

It would almost be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

At five thirty, Vera, Ari, and I quietly leave our room and meet the rest of the group outside the hotel. Inez, Ro, and Mal have headlamps shining from their foreheads, and the rest of us have the flashlight app on our phones as we navigate our way out of sleepy Padrón.

It’s the first time the tour group has walked before dawn, and there’s something almost spooky about the empty cobblestone streets and old churches in the dark. Everything looks different in the shadows, and it reminds me of Viana do Castelo, that morning Mal forced me out of bed at four so we could see the sunrise.

We trek along country roads that take us past misty pastures, toward wooden paths cloaked in darkness aside from the ten pinpricks of light moving in a jagged line.