home
People called me a homeless man. They equate a home with a house, with microwave ovens and an attic and plumbing and television.
But I never felt more at home than I did.
Real home is the world, and the only way to own the world is to be free, and to be truly and fully in it.
I took my rent deposit and sold my things and fell off the map. I was terrified and alone and colder and wetter than I’d planned: I learned to throw out my plans.
I had less than a thousand dollars to my name that first year; I was very literally starving for most of it and still happier than I’d ever been. I spent the years since hitchhiking, climbing thousands of pitches of trad, bathing in mountain creeks, building fires and highlines and the most fantastical friendships with radiant people, as if discovering human beings for the first time.
If I wasn't sleeping in the open, or under someone’s porch, or on a coiled rope with three hundred feet of air by my cheek, the only four walls I owned were made of nylon.
Everything changed.
I broke myself about as badly as you can without it being permanent. A shattered spine and wrist. A week in and out of consciousness, in and out of surgery, immobile, unable to eat or drink or sit up.
I have lived the majority of the months since flat on my back, and all of it indoors. I am very lucky: by the thickness of a dime I wasn’t paralyzed. Doctors say I’ll walk again.
But despite the ceiling I’ve stared at every day, despite the bed and food and television and all the luxuries at odds with how I’d been living, I have never felt more homeless.
I hope what’s behind me are the darkest times I’ll see. My family thinks I should give up, never climb again, find a respectable life and settle down. But even if it kills me I am getting back out there. That was my life, and I won’t give it up. I will get back up, even if my friends have to drag me there in a haulbag.
I am going to find a way back home.
