Page 115 of Every Step She Takes

I slide my arms out of my backpack and let the heavy bag fall onto the airport carpet with a clunk, making the weight off my shoulders both physical and emotional. I didn’t realize how fucking scared I still was to tell them until right now. I’ve always known that my family wouldn’t care if I was gay, and coming out to them wasstillthe hardest thing I’ve ever done, even harder than walking two hundred miles. Even harder than saying goodbye to Mal.

I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for Ro or Rebecca, who didn’t know what kind of reaction awaited them. How hard it must have been for eighteen-year-old Mal when she showed her dad her true heart and he scorned her for it.

“Oh, honey.” My mom’s hand is in my hair again. “You’re crying.”

I drop my head onto her shoulder.

“I think I’m ready to go home now.”

Mal

Some people cut their hair after a bad breakup. I book international flights.

At least, that’s what I’ve always done. Open the Kayak app on my phone. Choose some new, exciting destination. Hop on a plane, take off, run away. Meet a beautiful woman and follow her to Hong Kong or Laos or Wilmington, Indiana, to start the cycle all over again.

Right now, Alaska Airlines is running a special on flights to Costa Rica, and I have just enough Delta miles to get to Brisbane.

But I don’t want to go to Brisbane. For the first time in my life, I don’t want to get on an airplane at all.

Sadie is gone, and even scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef isn’t going to make me feel better about it.

But I can’t sit still, either, can’t stop walking, stop moving. I can’t sit in the silence for the next six days until my father’s funeral back in Porto. So, when Stefano tells me his plan to extend his Camino a few more days and walk out to Finisterre on the far western coast of Spain, I decide to join him.

It’s 120 kilometers to Finisterre via the seaside village of Muxía, and we do it in three days. We leave Santiago in the late afternoon, after a round of beers convinces me that this is a good idea, and we walk the twenty-two kilometers to Negreira in four and a half hours.

The next day, we push ourselves as far as we can—all the way to Muxía. Sixty kilometers over the course of fourteen hours, the most I’ve ever walked in a single day, and it’s not just my feet that are killing me. It’s every fucking part of my body and soul.

I’m punishing myself: for falling in love with Sadie, even when everyone told me not to; for falling into my same old patterns; for hurting myself, and Sadie, in the process.

But at least through all the screaming pain in my body, there’s no room for silence.

So, we walk. And walk and walk and walk.

We walk until we reach Cape Finisterre, the rocky cliffsides overlooking the Atlantic, what medieval pilgrims believed was the end of the world. We walk until we can literally walk no farther.

I collapse onto a rock in a pitiful heap, half convinced they’ll have to medevac me back to Santiago. Stefano, meanwhile, finds a smooth surface on which to begin his vinyasa.

“What. The. Fuck. Is wrong. With you?” It takes me nearly a minute to get out the question since I have to pause between every word to chug more water.

“What do you mean?” he asks from fucking Scorpion pose.

“This. Is not. Normal,” I gasp. “What are you running from, dude?”

“I do not run from anything.”

Stefano whips his body impossibly into a handstand.

“Then why are you incapable of sitting still? Why are you always moving?”

“I like to move,” he says while upside down. “I’ve always liked to move, ever since I was little.”

I am languishing on my rock in a pool of my own sweat, and this man continues to contort his body in unholy ways. “I’m sorry, but no one doesthatsimply because they enjoy physical movement. You’ve got to be outrunning some demons, my dude.”

Stefano flips himself like a pancake and ends up sitting cross-legged, facing me. “No demons,” he says. “I do not run from anything. I run toward it.”

I can barely lift my head, but I force myself to make eye contact with this ridiculous human when I ask him. “Run towardwhat?”

“Toward everything I want.”