"I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him."

"Maybe I'd die. Maybe I'd burn to ash in wind, or blacken like the pines. Charred skeletons, I'd add one to the count. I didn't feel scared. I didn't think to panic. The trail wasn't burning. I was raw, ripe for loving. I wasn't stopping."

"Squatting on my bed"after twelve years of trying and missing, in about two minutes total"I put my own contacts in for the first time. Second try on the right eye, first try on the left. I blinked in the contact, my apartment where I now lived alone and my story coming into focus."

"It finally had to.I understood that it wouldn't be easy, it would be very hard; I'd need to resist the habit I had developed long ago " with conviction. I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threats like a Taser gun. I'd stun them. They'd bow to me. I'd let my no echo against the mountains."

"I knew with certainty now-I could say no, and he would stop. Above all, I felt the fierce beauty of the choice. I knew now what it was that had held me from falling into my desire to be with him fully: I first needed to make sure he was a man who would respect my 'No."

"I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic."

"I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw-the shame wasn't mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself."

"I needed to begin respecting my own body's boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules."

"Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity-a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I'd never needed to consider water before."

"Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope."

"I couldn't yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To explain away strange magic, I'd convinced myself there was an unseen road cutting across the boundless desert floor like a scar. I imagined its different possible courses. The mystery intrigued me. I couldn't think of the real destination this road would have been built to lead to, but I accepted I couldn't see, and I accepted it was there, strange but " from where I stood " a beautiful vision."

"When we apply the lessons we've struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment-which is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them."

"I realized that no, no one would actually come to save or even stop me, I had absolutely no choice. The scale tipped: the moment not doing it became more difficult and unbearable than just doing it."

"On this walk I'd had so much time and space to actually figure out who I was without my mother's influence. I understood now: the things that my mother had found made her happy were not the same as the things that made me happy. And I understood: that was okay."

"I hoped my solitude would help me reclaim my innocence, remember who I'd been, to find who I wanted to be. To become her. To love her, Deborah, Debby, Doll Girl, Wild Child, me, despite the irreversible truth that I'd been raped. I was learning again that I could trust myself and, also, I was seeing, other people. I was brave enough now to go out alone towards what I wanted, to trust that I was strong enough for it, to know that help would come when I needed it. It always came."

"I'd believed I needed to be steady in myself before I could function with others-but surviving alone no longer felt like a good way either."

"Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing - able - to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed [my mom] to help me, to take care of things for me - and to save me - but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it."

"I needed only to allow myself to know what I already knew."

"I'd crossed a border-Speaking openly, exposing the weak girl I'd been, I was no longer her."

"He understood. In lovesickness we had found a common language."

"In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles " the stillness of fresh loss. People's cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened."

"It was suddenly Technicolor clear: the only thing holding me from giving myself vision this entire time had actually simply been me.I saw how in the fall and winter of my childhood, I'd walked through the golden aspens. And then I simply committed and gave myself my own eyes.I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough."

"I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough."

"And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path " the one, natural, trodden way."

"I was beginning to feel compassion for myself."

"I no longer needed to peel myself of my skin, or to hide. To Dash the colorless ephemeral things that existed just beneath my surface were as vivid as the beauty marks he traced on my cheek."

"I saw now that bad men existed who would take advantage of any weakness and insecurity they found when violating a victim. I saw it was not my fault; I did not choose to be raped or kidnapped. But now I was learning how to protect myself from the predators, to trust my No and my instinct and my strength. I was learning I was not to blame, I couldn't prevent men from trying to hurt me, but I could definitely fight back. And sometimes fighting back worked."

"As if violence could make light. Maybe violence could make light."

"I had feared this end, wondered where I would go from it, from the moment I first stepped on this footpath in the desert. But I found I was not afraid of reaching it now. I was happy. I hadn't found every answer for where I was going, but I now had all I needed to take these next steps. I knew I would do what I needed to become a writer now."

"If I couldn't find the trail before dark, I could wake tomorrow disoriented and desperate, without having even made any new miles; my loss of the PCT should have distressed me, but a new instinct led me forward. In this moment of despair I was refusing to stop fighting. I asked the mountains for some guidance, the strength to get myself out of here, and pulled wild power from within myself I'd never known I'd had.I was no longer following a trail.I was learning to follow myself."

"We aren't afraid of what we can explain. But the truth is stranger than an aimless road, it always was. The world was full of blinding mysteries, and I was blind to truth of what they were. There were things about the world I couldn't understand."

"And if I'd be left alone in the woods again, I smiled to think how I'd find new gifts and thrive. At the end of a long trail and the beginning of the rest of my life, I was committed to always loving myself. I would put myself in that win-win situation."

"I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred."

"Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity-a sacred thing."

"Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album."

"It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying."

"She'd taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me feel the weight of the essential way she had neglected me: she hadn't nurtured the potential of my strong and healthy independence."

"This was trail magic. Sea Breeze's fire, his light, his heat, his life, remained, their salvation. It is a fact that all drainages, if followed downhill, lead to the same lowland water body. Lost and fallen hikers follow drainages down because walking ridges is harder. And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path " the one, natural, trodden way. It isn't a coincidence that Sea Breeze, Brandon Day and Gina Allen, and countless other hikers all wandered, lost, down the same steep slope to nowhere."

"My mother overstated the dangers of the world " invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts' hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren't truly real."

"My malady was submission.The symptom: my compliance.The antidote was loud clear boundaries."

"All I could think as he was speaking was that, if he touched me at all, all the miles I'd walked, the pain I'd felt, the beauty I'd drunken like milk, like good wine making me happy, the four million steps I'd taken, would all add up to nothing. They'd be stolen. They'd vanish like the teeth children lose when they get hit. Only after the blood was washed away would I see that they were gone."

"Children believe they are immortal, death is an empty word like the name of a country they've never been to on a time-faded map. I wasn't a child anymore."

"I reached into my pack and held something small in the fist I made. "It's a pocketknife, I said, enunciating each letter. I was asserting myself, I'd snapped out of something; he visibly snapped out of something too. I saw it acutely in his dropping posture: doubt in his movement. I said, "The truck works. And so it did."

"I had stripped naked in front of men. Drunk. In morning's somber brightness I tried to remember why I had done it. Total exposure had seemed like the only way to be seen more clearly, heard, but now it seemed the opposite: a wild act that would define me."

"After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing."

"I had no evidence. No physical signs of my rape existed anymore. My body had already purged them. That was the irreversible reality."

"The entire time, he'd only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasn't the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he wouldn't have heard me. He'd never responded, not by stopping, not with his words."

"If I wanted to go to bed at ten o'clock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six p.m., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started walking when I wanted, kept going until precisely when I wanted to stop.When I was tired, feeling like stopping but wanting to persist, I'd listen to Blood On The Tracks."

"There was so little I wanted to carry. Packing my backpack took me all of four minutes."

"I was the director of my life, it was already true, and I would soon lead myself to my dreamed-of destinations.It was the task of my one thousand miles of solitude."