I remember reading somewhere before I left on trail that coming home from a long-distance hike felt like “being a puzzle piece that got mixed in with the wrong puzzle.” Now that I’m home from the Appalachian Trail, it’s become a repeating phrase in my mind.
I keep getting asked what it feels like to be home, and I’ve repeated that quote a couple of times. “It’s weird,” I say other times. “I’m getting back into the swing of things,” I say when I feel more confident.
“It must feel so good to be home!” I keep hearing.
And it is.
I got to hug my best friend, who I hadn’t seen since February, and we stayed up talking until midnight, actual midnight not hiker midnight. I spent Labor Day weekend with my family and extended family. I’m back working in a job I love with, frankly, the best coworkers in existence. Trezzie, my horse, nickered when I walked over to the fence, sniffing my face and stretching happily as I scratched her favorite spot. I got to play airsoft and chase people through the woods, attempting to pelt them with plastic pellets (and got pelted plenty myself). I got to take a mini-trip to Canada and back.
I have a new apartment with a friend I’ve been excited about moving in with for a while, and I finally have everything unpacked. I fell asleep last night reading a book I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. I have a kitty roommate who curls up with me in the morning, and I get to sit there with her, feeling the warm vibrations of her purrs. Lydia, my snake, is home, curled up under her favorite plastic cave. My friend got married and I was able to stand beside her as she said her vows.
I’ve slept. A lot. Napped in the middle of the day. Groggily sprawled out on my bed long into the morning. Drowsing through episodes of Stargate Atlantis. I’m eating non-trail food now. Gone are the days of cold-soaked oatmeal: now I have milk, cream cheese, chicken, homemade pizza.
Life, coming back from trail, is good right now.
And yet.
I’m lonely. It’s a strange loneliness, being surrounded by people I love and yet feeling a disconnect I don’t remember there being before, like somehow I’m off-kilter, on the wrong wavelength. I’m tired and energized simultaneously; my thoughts alternate between wanting to run an ultramarathon and wanting to curl up under a pine tree. I’m craving adventure, but I’m surrounded by houses. My hands tremble with adrenaline in the morning but two miles into a run, I feel tired.
The sunrise is framed by buildings, not trees. I haven’t seen red squirrels peering at me from the trees, even when I go hiking. I went on a small hike in Cuyahoga Valley to walk out the trembling adrenaline in my muscles, and nearly ended up in tears, though I’m not entirely sure why. In fact, I’ve consistently felt on the brink of crying, for absolutely ridiculous reasons either good or bad: my mocha tastes so good, someone honked at me, a coworker gave me a hug, I burnt my mac and cheese, the cat came and sat on my lap.
People still feel slightly overwhelming, the fact that there are so many of them, the fact that they are everywhere. I cried in my car; why do I feel so off-kilter from what was normal just months ago? Why is it a month later and yet I still feel out of place?
It’s strange, trying to find normal again, being confident off trail. It took me 45 minutes to put together an outfit on Sunday for church because all my clothing options were overwhelming. I put on my normal, pre-trail makeup to go to work, and even though it was very minimal, I felt overdone, like a mannequin stiffly propped up against the display-case wall. My mind still tries to wander about as if we were walking, and when I pull it back to the present, it comes with memories from hiking.
I’m rambling at this point, I know. I probably need some headers somewhere to break up the text, give it organization and readability, make it logical, so readers can easily follow along.
But I think there’s a truth in this little dash of chaos. Change is always messy. For things to change, there must be loss, and with loss comes grieving. And joy for what comes next, for what the change brings. There isn’t an easy way to come home from a thru-hike: it involves sitting in the uncomfortableness of the moment, alternating between missing the life you had over the summer and rejoicing in the life you get to build for yourself now. It involves tears, of happiness and sorrow, sometimes simultaneously.
One of my coworkers often told me when we worked together, “God doesn’t care what you do, He cares who you are.”
I’ve been holding onto that quote through this period of change. At the beginning of the trail, I thought I’d have all this time to think and wander and I would come back knowing exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
Instead, I came back as lost as ever as to where I wanted to be in a year, five years, ten years. People keep asking “What’s next?” and I repeat, “I don’t know.”
But I know who I want to be. Where that takes me will be an adventure only God knows.
And I can’t wait for it.
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