East Sooke

I went to East Sooke Park on the warmest sunniest day of the year so far. I had just learned that I was getting a story published in a magazine, a good magazine, the biggest one yet, and I was getting paid for it, and I had every reason to be happy., Euphoric, even. Walking by the ocean, brows at least done, published, in the summer. 

Except that I was anxious, because I had so much to do, and my abraded cornea was threatening to inflame, and I don’t know why but I’m just not feeling safe these days, and I feel increasingly in my head and unreal, and all the things I used to love this time last year just aren’t that interesting anymore, which hurts, and I just want love, love, love, and I’m getting so old and it’s not that nothing feels good but just that I don’t matter, to the world, at all. And my eye was feeling scratchy, and I would be 90 minutes from the car no matter which way I walked back, 90 minutes of blindness and tears and pain. 

I was frustrated that my ankle is still sore. That I never remember to modulate my voice to speak in my natural, higher, more attractive register. I was frustrated that this chronic eye thing is a thing and I can go blind if the wind blows my eyeball wrong. I was frustrated that I had nothing to say. 

But mostly I was sad because the world was so beautiful around me and I knew if I stopped and let it in, if I really just paused on the trail and sat on the grass and looked at the sun and the green and the ocean and the sky, really looked, I would cry, and split open, something critical in me would be paralyzed by it all, and I would never move again, at least not for an hour, and I would see in reality just how flawed was the dead reckoning I used to navigate this fucking pandemic, and how utterly insignificant I am, and how deep the wound is, and how unspecial I am for having it, and how it will never be rectified. 

Instead I spread my arms, and let the sun braise the soft skin on the inside, and felt the wind across my bare shoulders, and kept putting one foot in front of the other, not looking too hard at anything specific, and survived.

Time: 4H
Distance: 16K
Difficulty: Hard