The Salt Path

by Raynor Winn

chance for self-pity. I tightened the hip belt on my pack, shut the door on the whining voice and kept walking. Life is now, this minute, it’s all we have. It’s all we need.

No, the doctor should have said walk every day, do weight-bearing exercise, fight it, keep your mind active, look ahead, fight it. Then if it beats you, when it beats you, you’ll know you gave it everything, you didn’t lie down in front of the train.

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?

Had I seen enough things? When I could no longer see them, would I remember them, and would just the memory be enough to fill me up and make me whole?

‘Because I want you to keep me in a box somewhere, then when you die the kids can put you in, give us a shake and send us on our way. Together. It’s bothered me more than anything else, the thought of us being apart. They can let us go on the coast, in the wind, and we’ll find the horizon together.’

As a people can we only respond to need if we perceive it to be valid? If the homeless of our own country were gathered in a refugee camp, or rode the seas in boats of desperation, would we open our arms to them?

We were everything we wanted to be and everything we didn’t. And we were free, free to be all those things, and stronger because of them.

I was home, there was nothing left to search for, he was my home.