Page 54 of Every Step She Takes

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.

I can’t make out much more than silhouettes, but I know Mal, even in the dark. Even only in shadow and outline.

We come over a small hill to a path through the trees lit up with solar-paneled lights, and we click off our own lights.

The trail becomes thicker with other pilgrims, especially as the sun begins to rise over the valley.

Blue-gray mist clings to everything as we make it to our first stop of the morning.

The café is quiet, even as small groups come and go on their way to Santiago, all conversations hushed, almost reverent.

I order a cappuccino, and then I queue to use the restroom. By the time I join the rest of the group at the tables outside, there’s only one chair left, the one right across from Mal.

In the pale morning sun, I see the purple bags under her eyes and the tired set of her bowed mouth.

“We’re almost there. Only ten more miles,” Inez says, and even her tone is hushed, as if the proximity to Santiago is too sacred for her normal excited tone. “As we walk this last bit of the Camino, I want you to think about what you hoped to find in Santiago de Compostela.”

The truth is, I have no idea what I hoped to find.

I agreed to this trip to help my sister, to run away from my sister.

I agreed because I needed more time. Time away from the store, away from the family pressure.

Time to figure myself out. I thought if I managed to make it to Santiago, I would only find the things I wanted to escape waiting for me again.

We walk, and the path gets busier the closer we get to Santiago.

Large Spanish tour groups guided by people holding colorful flags create blockades that we have to weave around.

I get separated from the group more than once, lost in a sea of people in matching neon-yellow shirts for almost a mile, but I always end up alongside Ro and Rebecca, or Vera and Ari.

We’re all heading to the same place, after all.

What am I hoping to find in Santiago?

Closure, maybe? The ability to move on from my first love? The acceptance that this is part of what it means to be vulnerable with someone else. Sometimes, they shit all over your heart.

The path forks in front of us. The flocks of pilgrims all go one way, but Inez quietly beckons us with a hand to follow her in the other direction. “A more scenic route into the city,” she promises.

We can see the buildings of Santiago over the copse of trees, closer than ever.

About a mile from town, we pass through a crosswalk that’s been painted in the colors of the trans flag. Vera stops to take photos before realizing there’s more.

There’s a bench painted in the colors of the lesbian flag.

Another one like the bi flag. They’re at some kind of school or community center, and the courtyard is filled with gay benches and picnic tables, every surface painted like a different pride flag.

Everyone takes photos with them, and it feels like some kind of sign, to come across the place so close to Santiago.

I just don’t know what the sign means.

What am I hoping to find in Santiago?

Probably more than one city can give me.

It’s a church.

That’s what I find in Santiago.

We spill into the central square of Santiago de Compostela with dozens, if not hundreds, of other pilgrims after fourteen days and two hundred miles, and it’s just a fucking church.

It’s a cool church, I guess, but half of it is concealed behind construction scaffolding.

The square is full of pilgrims triumphantly celebrating the end of the journey.

Some take pictures, some reunite with old Camino friends, some sit in the middle of the square, backs propped against their packs, staring up at that stupid church like it has all the answers.

I keep looking at it, trying to see what they see.

The tour group sticks together long enough to take a final group photo, then scatters.

Most people go to line up to receive their pilgrim credentials.

Ro and Rebecca go to find some brunch. Vera lingers behind with me for a while and takes a thousand photos, not of the church, but of the people watching the church.

I’m frozen in place. Fourteen days. Two hundred miles. And it’s just a church?

“Do you want to go get our certificates?”

I turn, and there’s Mal, appearing at my side like she did a dozen times in the last two weeks.

I shake my head. “It’s just a church,” I tell her.

Mal glances over her shoulder at the spires, then back at me. “Well, yeah.”

Fourteen days, two hundred miles. Bruises and blisters. Shin splints and sunburns and side stitches. Horrible twin beds in horrible hostels. Laughter and tears. So much wine, and so little sleep.

“And it’s under construction.” I point to the ugly scaffolding. “What are people even looking at?”

“I don’t really think the destination is the point,” she says, her eyes on those half-covered spires.

She’s probably right. It shouldn’t matter that this is how it ends: with the two of us standing an awkward distance apart, barely able to look at each other.

All that should matter are those fourteen days, those two hundred miles we had together.

“Sadie,” she says, and a silly bubble of hope rises in my chest at the sound of my name in her mouth. “I’m sorry… if you didn’t find what you were looking for.”

I let myself stare at her then. At her blue mullet and her sexy widow’s peak. At her hazel eyes and her star tattoos and the perfect bow of her mouth. I stare at her mustard-orange fleece and her callused hands, and I try to memorize all of it now that it’s over.

“I think I did find what I was looking for, actually,” I tell her.

Mal opens her mouth, and for a moment, that stupid hope bubble makes me believe she’s going to tell me that she loves me too. That she’s going to admit that none of it was practice. That she’ll kiss me and mean it, right here, in front of this church.

But what she actually says is, “I’m going to miss you, Freckles.” And I realize this is goodbye.

I can’t bring myself to say those words, so I’m quiet when she sweeps me into one last hug. I try to memorize the way it feels when she holds me. Her lean body and her springtime scent.

“Friends?” she asks me before she lets go.

“Friends,” I say into her ear, and even though everything hurts, it’s a promise I want to keep.

It isn’t until I’m taking off my shoes at airport security that afternoon that I realize I’m still wearing Mal’s Hokas.

My flight home includes a layover in Amsterdam, and I buy three packages of stroopwafels to eat on the plane. They’re not nearly as good as nata, but nothing ever will be.

I have the window seat this time, and the man next to me watches Wedding Crashers on his iPad and never takes out his AirPods. There’s light turbulence coming into Seattle, and I clutch my armrest until it settles.