The Hike

by Lucy Clarke

“Du er modig som viser deg her!” he spat. Erik stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged.

You don’t know how much you love someone until you realize you’re never going to see them again. That you must live in a world where they no longer are. The finality of it, the utter endlessness of grief—it was overwhelming. She couldn’t fix it. Or change it. Or bargain with it. Or control it. It just happened and she was powerless. Grief was so brutal that she didn’t know if she’d survive. Some days she’d find herself walking the streets of Bristol looking around, thinking: How many of you have lost someone you’ve loved? How are you still standing?

You start choosing the parts of someone that you’d change or alter, and you realize those very parts are what also makes you love them.

If there had been a road to this beach, if they’d stepped out of a car, their pleasure at reaching this place would have been diminished. Joy was the reward that followed a struggle.

Wasn’t it that joy and struggle were so deeply enmeshed that you couldn’t experience one without the other?

Grief was like that—pockets of memory bubbling to the surface unbidden.

“To me, a friend is someone who is there when it counts: when a parent dies; when you’re going through a divorce; when life isn’t shiny and bright. Not for the holidays and the high days, or when you need a place to crash to try on a family Christmas for size.”

Loneliness wasn’t the absence of people, she realized. It was the absence of people who understood you.

“There is no meant to when it comes to feelings. You feel what you feel.”

If the mountains had taught Liz anything, it was that the journey was never about reaching the peak. You climbed—and kept climbing—to push through the struggle and experience the glimpses of beauty along the way. For how the climb made you feel.