The Salt Path

by Raynor Winn

I longed to be able to go to the chemist and collect a box of magic, anything that would stop the march of destruction burning through our life.

‘I think I can feel homelessness now, like a balloon cut free in the wind. I’m scared.’

Whining self-pity: I couldn’t afford to let it in.

The statue is a cross-section of a pregnant woman. One side whole, the other side showing the baby in the womb. She’s holding a sword aloft and the scales of justice behind her back. ‘No wonder she’s hiding the scales. Hide the truth behind a front that distracts the eye. It’s a true representation of British justice. Anyone can have it, if they can afford to tip the scales.’

civilization exists only for those that can afford to inhabit it, and remote isolation can be felt anywhere, if you have no roof and an empty pocket.

We’d tipped over the edge from modern-day civilization to a state of just existing, surviving.

‘It’s touched you, it’s written all over you: you’ve felt the hand of nature. It won’t ever leave you now; you’re salted.

On a basic level, maybe all of us on the path were the same; perhaps we were all looking for something. Looking back, looking forward, or just looking for something that was missing. Drawn to the edge, a strip of wilderness where we could be free to let the answers come, or not, to find a way of accepting life, our life, whatever that was.

The ease with which he’d walked out of his job carried the security of youth. The conviction that anything can be dropped today, safe in the belief that something else can be picked up tomorrow. Does that fade with age, as we look to the horizon and see time running out?

something in me was changing season too. I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable, not clenching in anxiety at the life we’d been unable to hold on to, or angry at an authoritarian system too bureaucratic to see the truth. A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance.

When do you accept that someone you love is ill? When a doctor tells you, or when you see it with your own eyes? And if you finally do accept it, what do you do then? Most sane people would instinctively care for them, relieve their pain, ease their suffering. I couldn’t do either. I couldn’t accept it, so I told myself it simply wasn’t true.

Homelessness had taught me that however much people think they want to help you, when you enter their home, you quickly become a cuckoo in their nest, a guest that outstays their welcome. Or their usefulness.

But that was a different life, long gone, and it seemed that now we were walking slowly out of our current existence into an unknown life where all we could hope for was insidious decay.

I felt exposed, vulnerable, as I never had on the path. The wild rawness of nature had never made me nervous, but here in the land of densely packed humanity I felt fear for the first time in my homeless life, every footstep, raised voice or car door making me jolt with adrenalin.

At last I understood what homelessness had done for me. It had taken every material thing that I had and left me stripped bare, a blank page at the end of a partly written book. It had also given me a choice, either to leave that page blank or to keep writing the story with hope. I chose hope.