This was all, I thought, that I would have to show for my efforts on the Camino. A Compostela and my Credencial. Broken heels and toes that healed at a glacial pace. I thought, I would come home, go back to my life, work out my new life.
But I walked the Camino for a reason. Some say it is just a really long walk. Others, they say that you walk the Camino at a time that is right for your life. For many people there is the sense of the mystical and spiritual about this journey.
But I needed this journey; I was glad of the opportunity to spend time challenging myself, but more than that, I had to spend time with my partner, to find out if there was anything that we could have together.
On the journey, hopes were raised and flattened. I was buoyed up by the conversations about our future and destroyed by those that refuted all those ideas. “We can never get back together,” I was told one morning after an evening planning holidays to Mongolia. And as I walked out of the airport on a drizzly Monday evening, I knew that there was no possibility of a future with my partner.
And yet, the sign I saw, said it all. I tried to keep believing, reminding him, “We worked so well together on the Camino. We laughed all the time.” My partner took his time, not wanting to believe in the life that we had shared on the Camino, fearing it to be a ‘holiday bubble’. And yet, slowly, he began to believe. And a week or two after we came back from the Camino, he came home and asked me to sit down.
I froze; fearing the worst news possible. And yet he took my hands and smiled. “Can we talk?”
talestrailsandtravels 