Closer to the Moon

What I need is a fresh voice, I think, walking through heavy rain in a coastal town in Spain. Six weeks and at last, a revelation! I am feeling delirious and a little drunk. Every time I stop to find a bathroom, I end up with wine. Water is so boring, and wine so cheap. I had quit my job and come to Spain to try to be interesting, but so had everyone else. Other people always ruin my mood.

Maybe I’d be the first person to walk across a country drinking only coffee and wine. My mom would be annoyed by this thought. Everyone I’ve met on the trail has already stopped for the day, but I just keep drinking and pushing on. My mom would be proud of this, the pushing on. She raised me too American for siestas. The more productive I am, the prouder she is, which makes this journey very conducive to her praise—all I have to do is keep walking. What would make my dad proud is if I wrote a happy story. I know this because he’s told me countless times, but no matter how I write them, my stories are always a bummer.

The rain on my glasses makes me feel like I’m playing a video game. I tilt my head back and forth as though I’m toggling a controller. I pull my hood up over my head and the water that’s accumulated in it for hours pours down my face and into my shirt. It doesn’t matter. Once you’re wet, you’re wet.

Once, at the beach as children, my older sister’s older friend splashed my little sister and my little sister got upset. “You gotta get wet sometime,” the friend said, and after that it became sort of a mantra, a metaphor. But of course, it’s not true. Just because you’re at the beach doesn’t mean you have to get wet. It would just make you more interesting.

The rain is relentless. It’s become one of those downpours where all you can do is look down and keep moving, hope for the best. A new friend told me she ran into a tree walking this way, a few hundred miles back. I could just get on a bus. No one would know; no one would care. I’ve already done what I set out to do, walked from France to the city where the dead saint was found decomposing and covered in shells or whatever. But I told myself at some point that I’d walk to the coast, meaning to not walk to the coast would be falling short. So after the end of the walk, I kept walking.

Now I’m dragging myself through this heavy cloud for the tenth straight hour to get to the beach, to see the ocean. Actually, I already saw the ocean, from up on a hill, and teared up a little—because I’d achieved my goal, or because I’d missed it, I’m not sure. It would be a lie to say I wept—who weeps, in reality? The only time I remember weeping, really weeping, is when a boy I liked embarrassed me in high school. I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe and almost ruined Christmas.

But I do love the ocean, even in the rain. In the first beachside town I walked through, I passed a hostel—“albergue” in Spanish—called Albergue de las Estrellas. This made me laugh—movie stars wouldn’t stay at a random hostel in a random town in Spain. But then I thought maybe it’s not about celebrities, maybe it’s about the stars in the sky, and this made me feel sad for some reason.

My boyfriend texts that he’s looking at the moon and thinking of me. It’s nearly full, he says. I rarely think of him lately when I look at the moon, so I like his text and say nothing, put my wet phone back into my wet pocket. He is a better person than I am, but less interesting. At least I pretend so, to keep things in balance.

Too many thoughts are building up in my head now, bouncing around like Bingo balls in one of those spinning cages. I should really stop and write something down. There’s music in the distance and I’m walking closer and closer to its source, which I find around a corner in a town so small it’s only a street. A concert. A makeshift roof made of umbrellas. I push through them, my backpack bumping into people, shedding water in sheets. I wonder why everyone is awake at this hour. But of course—it’s Saturday. Fiestas, not siestas. A dumb rhyme that I can’t get out of my head; it annoys me all the way up a steep hill, looping in rhythm with the clicking of my hiking poles.

I curse the hill—an unnecessary effort given that I’ve already made it to the coast—but at the top I can see past the town, see the snaking coastline and the moodiness of the gray sky stretched over the sea and I’m grateful for whoever decided to make me hike uphill one more time before I arrive.

Eventually I do arrive, follow the arrows until there aren’t any more, and the sky empties, and the moon is as big as I’ve ever seen it. The whole town comes down to the water to watch it rise, sweet and swollen on the horizon, a deep shade of orange.

I am sober again. I think of how far my body has carried me, day after lonely day. I think of my mom. I think of my boyfriend. I take steps this way and that, trying to get closer to the moon. This is, I think, a happy story.