aches

I wake up three days into the trek in Jagat, and I am sore. I ache. I eat breakfast, throw my pack on my back, and we’re on our way. As we get moving, the soreness starts speaking in new ways — the ankle that seems upset, the knee (not even the one I’d hurt a few days before I got on the plane!) that has had enough of the up and down, the bruises on my hips from a badly adjusted pack that was busily driving the hard part of its frame squarely into my ilium.

As I keep taking steps, mile by “Nepali flat” mile of rolling elevation change, each ache seems to submit to the inevitability that I will continue walking, and each one subsides from my consciousness in its own time.

That is, every ache but one. The one ache that will persist all day — the one that drove me to get on a plane and start walking in the first place — stays stubbornly at my side. Maybe one day, it, too, will dissipate. But today is not that day. Maybe not this trip, either.

* * *

The last few days of the trek are upon me. On the other side of the river, back at the beginning, I remember the expectation of being ground to dust. I hoped that the operation of walking for a few weeks would turn me into a pile of ash, from which I could partake of some mystical Phoenix-like rebirth. But there was nothing magical about a trail that would fundamentally change who I am. Staring down the end, I find that I am exactly the same as I was before, with the same fears and hopes and desires and longings and cravings, relating to the world in just the same ways as before.

The same as I always was, indeed — just maybe a few pounds leaner...