Page 19 of Every Step She Takes
“You don’t have to date a woman to be queer,” she says, pulling her knees up to her chest on the floor beside me. Her elbow brushes mine, and why does even the smallest, accidental touch make me feel like a stranger in my own body? “Attraction and action are different things.”
“But how can I even be sure if I’m gay if I’ve never kissed a woman?”
“Straight people are allowed to know they’re straight without kissing anyone,” she points out. “And I didn’t kiss a girl until I was seventeen, but I knew I was queer the first time I laid eyes on Julia Styles in 10 Things I Hate About You .”
I pull my legs up to my chest, too, and hug them tight. “My Nan opened the store when I was six,” I hear myself say, “and I spent my whole childhood helping her run it. And then my mom, well… she sort of got… sick. After my dad left.”
“Sick?” Mal prompts without demanding I share.
I share anyway. “Depressed. My mom has always struggled with depression and anxiety, but that… that was a really hard time. I had to take care of the store and my sister and my mom, and I was only twelve. And at twenty-one, I inherited all of it.”
“Inherited?” Apparently, Mal’s strategy is just to repeat key words back to me until I elaborate on them. I’m not sure why it’s working.
“My Nan left everything to me. Before I even finished undergrad, I had a store to run and a house to maintain. I-I never had time to question anything. And at a certain point, I didn’t want to question anything, because I had this sneaking suspicion that if I did, my entire idea of myself would crumble all around me. ”
“I see.” Mal nods slowly. “So you didn’t just miss out on a queer adolescence. You missed out on any adolescence.”
“I guess…”
Mal clears her throat. “I can relate to that a bit, actually,” she says.
I turn my head to study her face in profile, waiting for her to share more, but her gaze remains fixed forward, and she doesn’t offer any other personal details.
She hasn’t shared anything personal about herself, now that I think about it.
Mal projects this outgoing, carefree demeanor, but there’s something in the set of her jaw right now that suggests there’s more going on just beneath the surface.
Almost as if the right sandpaper could scrape away her varnish and reveal the true grain pattern underneath.
I want to peel back the varnish, but not everyone wants to share their most intimate secrets within forty-eight hours of meeting someone, so I drop it. “What do you do when you missed your chance to be a messy teenager?” I ask rhetorically.
Mal releases her knees, and her long, bare legs spill out in front of us. “You give yourself permission to be a messy thirty-five-year-old.” She’s her happy-go-lucky self again. “You have your second adolescence right now !”
I gawk at her. “Um… how ?”
She jumps up excitedly. “You said you came on this trip to escape real life. So, for the next two weeks, what if you relive all those experiences you were denied as an adolescent?” She begins pacing our cramped room.
“Like sneaking out and going to a party, and having a crush, and holding hands with a girl.”
“What girl?”
“We’ll find one,” she says dismissively as she continues her enthusiastic laps across the floor. “You can get bangs and pierce something you shouldn’t and kiss a stranger, if you want. You can do whatever you want. Mess up and make mistakes and just be .”
I snort. “That sounds nice, but I’m not really…”
Not really what ? Why does what she’s describing feel as impossible as finishing this two-hundred-mile journey?
Mal stops excitedly twirling around the room and looks down at me. Whatever she sees on my face shatters her brief glee. “But first, we’ve got to take care of these feet,” she says soberly. “Did your sister tell you to pack Compeed?”
“Yes!” I try to get up to grab the bandages from atop my bed, but my calf muscles seize, and I end up right back on my ass.
“Where?” Mal asks. She doesn’t even laugh at the fact that I can no longer stand on my own accord.
I point to the blue cosmetics bag on my twin bed.
She grabs it. “After your shower, we’ll get your feet as dry as we can, slather them in Vaseline, and cover them with socks.
Then in the morning, we’ll cover your blisters with Compeed.
It should work like a second skin and will last for a few days.
Come on.” She sticks out her hand. “I’ll help you get into the shower. ”
“I can get in the shower by myself,” I mumble.
“Oh yeah?” Mal grins. “Show me how you can stand up on your own again?”
In the face of her mockery and my debilitating exhaustion, I stick out my tongue at her.
She laughs. “Let me help you up,” she insists, and I do.
“First, shower,” she says. “And then we can get to work fixing your pack.”
“What’s wrong with my pack?”
Everything, it turns out, is wrong with my pack.
After a long shower, Mal makes me spend an hour cutting my belongings in half. She holds up each item like the Marie Kondo of long-distance trekking, asking me if I really need it. But I need everything I packed.
“You absolutely do not need two pairs of jeans .” Mal takes them out and throws them onto the floor. “They’re heavy, they take up too much room, and everyone will laugh at you if you trek wearing jeans. We’re leaving these behind.”
This goes on. She chucks one of my cardigans, two of my crop tops, my blow-dryer, and all my skin-care products except my sunscreen.
“That moisturizer is ninety-five dollars!”
Mal puts it directly into the trash. “I’ll Venmo you.”
Vera’s comment about Mal having money flashes in my mind, but then I’m diving to save my electric toothbrush from the junk pile.
“That thing is way too bulky! You can get a small, cheap one from the farmácia for a euro.”
“I can’t get rid of anything else!”
“You can and you will .” She gets rid of my Lonely Planet guidebook, my crossbody purse, my white sneakers (“Could you have packed anything more impractical ?”), and my makeup bag.
“Wait! I can’t part with my makeup!”
“We are trekking . There’s no better time to divest from the beauty industry.”
“But I like being invested in the beauty industry.” I hug the cosmetics bag to my chest.
“Just make sure you’re wearing makeup for the right reason,” she says with some of Inez’s spiritualism in her voice.
“What’s the right reason?”
Mal doesn’t answer because she’s suddenly distracted by my three coats.
She accepts that I need the iPad and notebook to work on my sister’s blog, but she throws out the dress Vi made me pack (“You can get drunk in yoga pants.”), the sound machine (“Is this for a baby?”), and half of my underwear (“You’re supposed to stink on the Camino. That’s half the fun!”).
The next morning, there is a stack of my so-called shit on my remade twin bed. She writes donation on the back of a receipt and sets it on top of the stack. Apparently, pilgrims leave things behind at albergues all the time, and items are passed along to people who need them.
When we set out for the day at eight in the morning with the rest of the group, my pack is at least ten pounds lighter.
Mal has redistributed everything, putting the heaviest items on the bottom, and adjusted the straps to the right height for my body.
She secures the small strap across my chest, even though it smooshes my boobs, and the pack feels almost weightless on my shoulders, my hips holding most of the burden. I feel almost weightless.
The toe socks are conspicuous at first, as are Mal’s shoes, but after the mile, my feet settle into this new rhythm. My calves still ache, my forehead is sunburned, and I’m the most physically exhausted I’ve ever been, but there’s something almost hypnotic about the walk. I almost enjoy it.
The walk from Vila do Conde to Esposende starts with a stretch of wooden boardwalk along the beach, but the blue skies and sparkling ocean help ease the annoyance of it today.
May in Seattle is unpredictable, but here, May is glorious.
Warm, with a light breeze coming off the water, everything green and saturated and remarkably alive .
On the outskirts of town, we stumble upon a market with wares clearly targeting pilgrims that packed horribly. Shorts and raincoats, sunscreen and hats. Mal grabs one of the hats—a cheap baseball cap with an anthropomorphic oyster shell embroidered on the front—and shoves it onto my head.
“You can’t do the Camino without a hat.”
It’s the single ugliest accessory I’ve ever seen. I love it.
Ari studies us as Mal pulls my ponytail through the back of the cap, and I attempt to hide my blush beneath the stiff bill. Ari cocks her head to the side, then snorts. “That oyster shell looks like vulva.”
“Will you please help me order real coffee?” I beg Mal at our midmorning stop.
“You don’t want to water anymore plants with your espresso?
” She smirks at me. “You can order a cappuccino most places,” she explains as she leads me inside the café, where patrons are drinking espresso and beer in equal measure, even though it’s before noon.
“Or you can ask for café com leite, coffee with milk.”
“Yes, that,” I say. She approaches the counter and begins speaking Portuguese with the middle-aged man behind the counter. I have no idea what they’re saying, but I find myself watching the way her bowed mouth moves around the unfamiliar sounds.
“Are you hungry?” Mal switches back to English and turns to me.
I have never been this hungry in my whole life. Apparently walking all day works up an appetite. “I could eat,” I tell her. She orders something, and a minute later, a white plate with six round pastries appear in front of us. “What are those?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Mal shouts, and the drunk and/or over-caffeinated customers stare at us. “You’ve been in Portugal for forty-eight hours, and you haven’t tried pasteis de nata yet?”
“What’s a pasteis de nata?” I ask at a reasonable indoor volume.
“The only thing I like about this country,” Mal answers. She picks up one of the pastries and shoves it toward me aggressively. “Try it. Right now. I want to watch.”
“That’s… weird…” I take the small treat from her and study the flaky crust and the custard-like middle.
“It’s not weird. You’ll get it when you taste it.”
I gingerly take a bite, and oh my fucking Christ .
The flavor explodes across my tongue. The buttery crust, the lusciously decadent custard, the hint of spice.
Cinnamon, maybe, or nutmeg. I temporarily leave my body as the sweetness flows through me, and when I return to earth, I am moaning obscenely into my last bite of pasteis de nata.
I’ve somehow blacked out and eaten three of them standing here at the bar, and now Mal is staring at me with an unreadable expression.
But the custard is so delicious, I’m not even embarrassed by my reaction. “Okay,” I tell her, licking my fingers for any lingering taste. “I get it.”
Mal clears her throat. “Nothing like it, right?”
I want more, but we have to rejoin the group for sharing circle.
“Today, I want us to create our intentions for this trek,” Inez says in her sage voice once we’re all gathered together.
“The third day is one of the hardest. Your body is sore and tired, and you’re not yet used to the daily distances.
When it gets challenging today, I want you to return to your intention.
I want your intention to be your true guide on the Camino. ”
Ro snorts derisively into their croissant, and Mal angrily throws a pasteis de nata at them.
While Inez’s constant prompting for self-reflection can feel heavy-handed at times, this morning her words niggle at something in the back of my mind.
I agreed to this trip because I wanted to escape, and if she’d asked me my intention yesterday, I would’ve said it was simply to survive the Camino.
But now I’m here, on a sidewalk café in Europe, with the taste of custard lingering on my lips.
There are cobbled streets and sunlight and trees.
There’s a long path in front of me, and a Portuguese lesbian beside me who just wants to help, and I feel like I can aim for something better than surviving .
I’ve been in survival mode since I was twelve years old.
I think I can do better than escape .
Maybe Mal was right, and for the first time in my life, I can simply be .
Maybe it’s time to make some mistakes.
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cestlavi
Hey Nomads! Please allow me to introduce you to the love of my life: the pasteis de nata. She’s small, but she is mighty.
And make sure you feast your eyes on my latest blog post about eating my way to Esposende, where I rank everything I’ve eaten on the Camino so far. (It turns out walking almost 14 miles in a single day makes you surprisingly hungry…)
#beatrixtours #cestlaviwithme #travelblog #broadsabroad #travel #portugal #spain #caminodesantiago #solowomentravelers #pasteldenata #foodporn
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: a white plate with two custards, sitting on a yellow tablecloth