“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a Substack community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.
In the morning I could see my pale breath, and when I unzipped the front flap of my tent I watched it mingle with the same elemental mist outside. As the sun rose further the vapor retreated to the valley below me, floating just above the treetops. In the distance a painter had carefully curated the hills in shades of grey and blue, stacking them from the green of the forest floor to ever lightening shades until the last layer disappeared within the sky. Ripples of light moved into my consciousness, and I remembered watching the last tendrils of sunset linger on the water below the night before. Now in reverse, the growing daylight revealed the shape of the river as it wound through the valley below me, meandering around small juttings of green inlets and islands.
I was in a gap year between school and college, meant I suppose to give space before more serious life began. I was roughing it in Zimbabwe. Out on my own for the first time, seeing things from a vastly different perspective. That’s the way it had been framed at any rate. Looking back on this privilege makes me wince at my naiveté. I took all of my assumptions for granted then. Meaning that I took for granted that there were any assumptions. I certainly had a higher and broader perspective waking on a high cliff on a ridge in the Eastern Highlands that morning. One or two tiny homesteads in the distance below were the only reminders that I was not solitary in the landscape, and that I had not gone back in time. I felt like a huge presence, and yet the smallest thing in the universe all at once. Was that what it felt like to be lonely?
My tent had been borrowed so I remember taking great care to wait until the sun had warmed it enough to shake out the last drops of moisture before I folded it back into its case. I took the tent poles into a bundle and tied them onto the side of my pack before I started my walk down. My stomach growled, and I could feel my blood pumping in my ears. If I stopped and listened I could hear the rush of water that must have been the falls I had seen in pictures. High water descending through and over a high rock precipice, pouring in a straight white line into a pool hundreds of feet below. This moving water had cut these valleys into the rock over unrecordable time, and enabled the forest to grow here. I remember thinking that these were big thoughts. As if the expanse of the landscape gave my head more room to run. I was on a trip through geological time, layers of sky, mist, shafts of sun coursing through moving clouds, rock formations, forest, and finally at the bottom the long cut dirt road that led out through sparse, rocky terrain. The landscape was foreign, yet I did not feel like a foreigner. That thought was also new. What should and did a foreigner feel like?
I put my thumb out when I heard a motor in the distance behind me, a different reverberation than that of the nature around me, jagged and forced. An old and pinkish-dusted pickup truck stopped a few yards ahead of me. There was only a hand on top that gave a thump to sit down after I had climbed on, and a pair of eyes in the rear view mirror through the back cab window. There was no need to tell him where I was going. The road led to the only place there was to go. At another thump of his hand on the metal cab roof I looked again through the back window into the small oblong piece of glass that held his floating eyes. I was deposited into the center of a town. I only had a chance to wave in thank you as he drove off.
Here. This is the whole point of the story. Not the scenery or my expanding mind. But the sudden plummet in my new perspective when I discovered that the tent poles were no longer tied to my pack, and were most likely going wherever the truck was going. I don’t remember the exact moment that I realized they were gone. I fell into a wormhole of my brain. I was a pretender. It was that scene in the movie where cinematographer slows down the film. I was the still center of life whirling around me on the streets. And yet my mind raced. I know now that this is what it feels like to panic. I had no footing. Not enough to rent a room, nowhere to sleep, no cell phone or credit cards in those days. I was on my own. I was a pair of eyes floating in an oblong reflection.
A ‘gap’ year suddenly became ridiculous. Whose idea had it been? My parents no doubt, and more likely my father’s. I was suspicious that the whole trip to the Eastern Highlands had been meant to show me only my own emptiness. The thought did occur to me that I might be reacting to something in the last bit of the water in the bottom of my metal army surplus canteen that I had swallowed. Some psychedelic drug that I had heard about but hadn’t yet tried. But who could have crept up the high ridge in the dark to find it in my tent and put it into my canteen?
Of course I was resourceful. I was nineteen. I did find food and shelter and make it home. But during that adaptation to chaos I sealed off any possibility of feeling that panic again. Losing a set of my parents’ friends’ tentpoles was only a trigger for what must have been adding up slowly. A gap year. An empty place. A non place. A visitor. A voyeur. A young man with a rucksack and words. I can string together words about anything. I knew that even at nineteen. I could write that I felt like an animal that had just lost its carapace. But it’s too ridiculous. These don’t describe the shock of the sudden realization that I had always assumed that I had a carapace. Not only weren’t there going to be any more tent poles, but they had never been there in the first place. They were a ruse, and their loss showed me what I was up against, and would likely always be.
After my meal and a night’s sleep in an inexpensive hostel I woke ready for my trip home. I felt different, and it wasn’t just my pack that was lighter. It was me. What I know now is that I had managed to shut down whatever opening that I had found into that dark bottomless place the day before. It was an achievement. I hadn’t realized how easily accessible it was, and I didn’t want to find out again. I had grown up in that 24 hour period. I became the beginning of what I would grow into. A man with an even pace, who takes uneven ground in straight lines and packs his bags methodically in case mischief should arise - as it will - and throw him back down inside himself. Mission accomplished.
But now I can see that I had been carrying a heavy structure around with me wherever I went so that I would never have to feel that panicked emptiness again. People called it loneliness. I had no idea what they were referring to. I couldn’t afford to understand. And now I think I have to go looking for that place again. And here’s where the story really begins. In this spot.