Excerpted fromWild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest TrailbyCheryl Strayed (Knopf).
2012
By the age of 26, I’d done a lot of hard things.
I’d watched my mother die youngand fastof cancer.
I’d relinquished any hope of having a father who would be a father to me.
I’d divorced a man I loved.
I’d tangled my sorry self into a ridiculous knot of ill-advised sex and drugs.
That the last thing was a good one didn’t make it any less hard.
The very thought seemed like a betrayal.
Of course, living without my mother was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
But hiking the PCT was difficult in a way that made the other hard things seem easier.
Perhaps I’d known from the beginning that tackling the PCT was a grab for a cure.
Collecting it seemed like a monumental milestone, proof that I’d made it at least that far.
“Hello,” I’d say.
“I’m a PCT hiker here to pick up my box.
My name is Cheryl Strayed.”
Cheryl Strayed.Those two words still rolled hesitantly off my tongue.
I never liked it.
It was complicated and cumbersome.
I saw his point.
The line beneath the question was blank.
We could write anything, be anyone.
Later, alone in my apartment, I was haunted by that blank line.
Nothing fit until, one day, the wordstrayedcame into my mind.
Immediately, I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine.
Only the boy didn’t exist.
I was my own boy, planting a root in the center of my rootlessness.
Still, I had my doubts.
It was the other lines that gave me pause, the ones demanding signatures that would dissolve our marriage.
Those were the ones I completed with trepidation.
The day we signed the papers, it was April and snowing.
We sat across from a woman named Val, who was an acquaintance and a notary public.
We’d chosen her to officiate our divorce because we wanted it to be easy.
We wanted to believe we were still gentle, good people.
That everything we’d said to each other six years before had been true.
“What was it we said?”
we asked when we finally decided that we were going through with this.
We’d given them a title: The Day the Daisies Bloomed.
“The Day the Daisies Bloomed!”
I hooted, and we laughed so hard at the people we used to be.
Then I set the vows back where I’d found them, unable to read on.
We’d married when I was 19 and he was 21.
We were wildly in love and felt we had to do something to demonstrate that.
But even married, we had no intention of settling down.
We moved to Dublin, then London.
And now we were getting divorced.
I was unified with Paul against whatever contrary claim she might make.
“I love him,” I blurted when we were nearly through, my eyes filling with tears.
“I mean, this is not for lack of love, just so you know.
We love each other.”
“I know,” Val said.
“And it’s all my fault,” I said.
“He didn’t do anything.
I’m the one.
I broke my own heart.”
Paul reached to me and squeezed my leg, consoling me.
If I looked at him, I would say we should forget about divorcing and he’d agree.
But I didn’t look.
Something inside of me whirred like a machine that I had started but couldn’t stop.
“I hope you might, too,” he said.
When she died, I’d have given anything to have them back.
Maybe once Paul and I were divorced, I’d miss these days, too.
“What are you thinking?”
I switched on the light.
It was up to us to mail the divorce documents.
Together, Paul and I walked into the snow and down the sidewalk until we found a mailbox.
Afterward, we leaned against the cold bricks of a building, crying and murmuring regrets.
“What are we doing?”
Paul asked after a while.
“Saying good-bye,” I said.
We stood there, looking into each other’s eyes.
“Cheryl Strayed,” he said after a while, my new name sounding strange in his voice.
“Is this yours?”
she asked when she returned a few moments later.
She held it up so I could see my new name in bold, black marker across the top.
“Yes,” I said, taking it from her.
“It’s mine.”
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