Strange Love

by Eden Routledge (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Spain

I stepped onto the dry, clay colored path, stirring small particles of dust into the already swirling cloud of ancient Earth that seemed to have followed me the four hours I had spent meandering through the crisp morning air of my last day on the Camino de Santiago. For more than a thousand years faithful pilgrims had made the long seven hundred and fifty, kilometer trek from the base of the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compestela. Legend has it that when the apostle St. James died, his body was transported to Galicia, Spain by two apostles in a boat led by angels. King Alfonso II had a small chapel, later to be built into a grand cathedral, constructed to attract pilgrims from all over Europe to walk the path and hopefully settle along its route. My interest predated the Christians to a time when pilgrims earlier than the eighteenth century walked the path that followed the Milky Way to Finnis Terae or what is now Fin Tierra, the end of the Earth. They believed the land was infused with magic and was the place where the land of the living could creep its closest to the land of the dead. I reached down to adjust the belt around my waist shifting the now, crippling thirty-five pounds I had carried for five hundred miles off my shoulders. My hands sent a small, sharp pain of warning as the blood pooled in my swollen fingertips that resembled the smoked chorizo sausages from my pilgrim’s dinner, the night before, that sat like a sandbag at the bottom of my stomach. My eyes, still inflamed from the long night of quiet sobs muffled by my flat pillow, caught my first sight of it. The looming, sharp gothic hat of the Cathedral piping out above the winding path ahead of me. Up until then I’d only seen it in the glossy, sweet smelling pages of my pilgrim’s guide pictures. I stood atop a small hill staring out across the rolling grass hills of the foreign land I had spent the last five hundred miles learning to call home, wondering if I too, like the pilgrims before me, would find salvation. My journey to Santiago had begun thirty-five days prior but I felt like I’d been running to Santiago my entire life. Trying to escape the bitter scent that trauma had left on the heel of my childhood crushed by a dead father, a fragmented sense of self and a lack of money that kept me latched onto a cycle of endless survival. I hoped I could follow the Milky Way to the end of my old life and cross the veil into a new one. I shuffled through the busy cobble stone streets of Santiago, peering through shop windows and marveling at the hodge-podge of the ancient and modern mixing together beautifully as I hugged and kissed cheeks with the family I had built across the world, so far from my own. As I waded through the tired bodies littering the steps of the cold, ominous cathedral I felt my feet begin to sink into the warm cement. My breath became short and labored and I could feel the knot creeping back up through my throat. My eyes burned with the hot tears I could no longer stop and they rushed out like a river through a broken damn. I just wanted to be free. Then, the warm weight of a hand laid down on my aching right shoulder and then another on my left. I looked up through the blurry, salt in my eyes and saw a mass of my fellow pilgrims surrounding me. Each with their eyes closed and hand placed gently on the shoulder next to them as if through touching the person next to them, they were touching me. Thousands of miles from the place and the people I had called home, from the comfort of my bed and the sanctuary of the familiar, touched by strange hands in a strange place, I found my salvation. Not in the crowded, empty walls of a church but in the warm hands of loving strangers.