When I Became Who I Already Was

By the time Madeline realized she was in trouble, the voices of her family had already begun to fade into the trees above her.

She stopped at the edge of the trail and wrapped one hand tightly around the wooden railing, trying to convince her lungs that there was enough air. Her heart pounded against her ribs with a force that frightened her, and sweat had soaked through the back of her shirt despite the shade offered by the towering Douglas firs. Both feet throbbed, but the pain in her heels had become almost unbearable. Each time she put her weight on them, a sharp sensation shot upward through her feet and into her legs. She leaned more heavily against the railing and closed her eyes. "Just give me a minute," she whispered, although she wasn't entirely sure whether she was speaking to her body, the mountain, or herself.

She tried to breathe slowly. In through her nose, out through her mouth. Somewhere she had heard that was supposed to help when panic started creeping in, but she couldn't tell whether she was panicking because she couldn't breathe or couldn't breathe because she was panicking. At the moment, the distinction seemed unimportant. She only wanted her heart to slow down.

A young couple passed her on the way up, both carrying small backpacks and metal water bottles. The woman gave Madeline a polite smile as they passed, and Madeline smiled back automatically. The moment they were beyond her, she lowered her eyes toward the dirt. She knew what she looked like: a woman well over three hundred pounds standing halfway up a mountain trail, red-faced, sweating, and pretending she wasn't struggling. There was a perfectly reasonable chance the couple hadn't thought anything about her at all. They had their own lives and their own reasons for being at Multnomah Falls that afternoon. Madeline knew that logically. Shame, however, had never been particularly interested in logic. Shame could turn every stranger into a witness.

She looked toward the bend in the trail ahead. "Damon?"

There was no answer. The path curved sharply several yards above her and disappeared behind a thick wall of trees and rock, but she could still hear voices somewhere beyond it. One of the kids laughed. Damon's mother said something Madeline couldn't make out. She called his name again, louder this time.

"What?" Damon shouted back.

"I need to stop for a minute." Madeline straightened as much as she could and tried unsuccessfully to pull in a full breath. "I can't—I don't think I can go any farther."

For several seconds, the only answer was the distant roar of the waterfall and the crunch of other hikers' shoes against the trail. Then Damon called back, "Just rest for a few minutes. We're gonna keep going."

Madeline stared at the empty curve ahead of her. She waited, thinking perhaps he would appear around the corner before continuing, or that one of the others would call down and ask if she was all right. No one did. Instead, their voices grew quieter until the mountain swallowed them completely.

"Oh. Okay," she said softly, although by then there was nobody close enough to hear her.

For a moment she remained standing with both hands on the railing. Then she lowered herself carefully onto a wide section along the edge of the trail and stretched her legs in front of her. Her knees hurt when she bent them and hurt differently when she straightened them. Her heels were worse. The plantar fasciitis had been bothering her for months, especially first thing in the morning, but lately the pain seemed to follow her throughout the day. Between that, the arthritis in her knees, and the weight she carried, almost everything had begun to hurt. At forty years old, she sometimes felt as though she were living inside a body twice her age.

Another family came up the trail. A little boy walked several yards ahead of his parents, carrying a stick like a sword and swinging it at invisible enemies along the way. His father called for him to slow down, but the boy continued climbing with the absolute confidence of someone who had never considered that his body might refuse to take him where he wanted to go. Madeline watched until he disappeared around the bend, feeling an unexpected ache in her chest that had nothing to do with exertion.

She remembered feeling like that once.

That morning, when they had first arrived at Multnomah Falls, Madeline had stood near the bottom and tilted her head back until she could see the water spilling over the enormous cliff above them. Mist floated through the air and settled cool against her face. Tourists crowded around taking pictures, children pointed toward the falls, and people moved constantly along the paths around them, but for a few minutes Madeline had barely noticed any of it. She had simply stood there looking up.

It was beautiful in a way photographs never quite captured. More than that, it made something inside her stir awake.

Damon had been the one to mention the trail. "You can hike all the way up, you know."

"To the top?" she had asked.

"Yeah."

Madeline had stared toward the cliffs. "All the way?"

Damon laughed. "That's generally what 'to the top' means."

She had ignored the sarcasm because she was too busy imagining what it would feel like to stand up there and look down. She wanted to see what existed beyond the part everyone photographed. She wanted to know where the trail went and what the world looked like from the other end of it.

There had been a time when curiosity alone would have been enough to send her running toward that trail. When Madeline was little, she had been certain she was going to have adventures. Real adventures. She planned to travel the world, write books, design beautiful clothes, explore ancient places, and live some wonderfully improbable combination of author, fashion designer, and Indiana Jones. Even as a child, she'd suspected she would make more sensible footwear choices than Indiana, but otherwise she saw no reason she couldn't do all of it.

Back then, impossibility had been something other people worried about. Madeline simply assumed that if she wanted something badly enough and worked hard enough, she would figure it out. The world had seemed enormous, and somehow she had believed there was room in it for her.

Standing beneath Multnomah Falls that morning, she'd felt a tiny flicker of that girl again.

"I want to do it," she had said.

Damon looked at her. "The whole trail?"

Madeline heard the surprise in his voice and pretended she hadn't. "Why not?"

His eyes moved over her for half a second before he shrugged. "Okay."

She knew that look. It had been quick enough that Damon could have denied it if she'd challenged him, but Madeline knew what she had seen. He didn't think she could do it. The sensible part of her had wondered the same thing, but she'd pushed that thought aside and started walking.

For the first part of the hike, she'd actually enjoyed herself. She stopped whenever the trees opened enough to give her another view of the falls. She laughed with the kids, took pictures, and tried not to worry about how far they had left to go. When the trail became steeper, she slowed down, but she kept moving. Damon and the others gradually pulled ahead, and Madeline told herself it didn't matter. She wasn't racing anyone. She only wanted to finish.

Then the pain began. Her feet started first, followed by her knees and lower back. Every time she rounded another curve and saw the trail continuing upward, she promised herself she only had to make it to the next bend. When she reached that bend, she made the same promise again. One more turn. One more stretch. One more step. She had no idea how long she'd been negotiating with herself before her breathing became frightening.

Now she sat alone on the trail, staring at the shoes she'd carefully chosen that morning because she'd thought they would hurt less than the others she owned.

She had wanted this badly. That was what embarrassed her most. If she hadn't cared, she could have laughed about the whole thing and waited at the bottom with a cold drink while everyone else voluntarily tortured themselves on a mountain. But she had cared. She wanted to stand at the top. She wanted to know what it felt like to finish something difficult and look back at the distance she'd traveled. Instead, she'd made it partway, and partway felt dangerously close to failure.

Her eyes burned. Madeline wiped beneath them before the tears could fall. She refused to sit on the side of a trail and cry because she couldn't climb a mountain, although some part of her knew it wasn't really about the mountain.

She pulled out her phone and checked the screen. No signal. "Perfect," she muttered before slipping it back into her pocket.

People continued passing in both directions. Some were sweating and breathing hard enough to reassure her. Others looked irritatingly fresh. An older woman moved slowly up the trail using trekking poles, carefully placing one foot in front of the other. Madeline watched her progress until she disappeared around the curve.

Maybe she could do that. She could take one step, rest, then take another. Nobody said she had to move quickly.

Madeline planted both hands beside her and pushed herself upright. Pain immediately shot through her heels, and her heart began racing again before she'd taken more than a few steps. She stood still, fighting with herself while all the familiar accusations rushed forward. She was lazy. Weak. Pathetic. Too heavy. She had done this to herself, and now she was paying for it.

"Come on," she whispered. "You can do this."

She took another step.

Her body answered with pain.

For several seconds, Madeline stood there staring up the trail. Then, slowly, she sat back down.

The humiliation of that hurt almost as much as her feet.

Time passed strangely after that. Ten minutes might have been thirty. Madeline stopped checking. Eventually she heard familiar voices above her, and a few moments later the kids appeared around the bend, flushed and excited. One of them was talking so quickly Madeline couldn't follow the story. Damon's family followed, and Damon came down behind them with his water bottle in one hand.

"There you are," he said.

Madeline nearly laughed. Where else would she be? Instead, she smiled at the kids and asked, "How was it?"

"It was so cool!" one of them said.

Damon unscrewed the cap from his water bottle. "You would've liked it."

Madeline glanced up the trail. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. It was pretty cool."

The kids began telling her about everything they'd seen, sometimes talking over one another in their excitement. Madeline listened and asked questions because none of this was their fault. They were excited, and she wanted them to be. She was their mother. Surely she could be disappointed for herself and happy for them at the same time.

When everyone started down, Madeline pushed herself onto her aching feet and followed.

She had assumed going downhill would be easier. It wasn't. Every step drove her toes forward inside her shoes and sent pain through her knees. Within minutes she had fallen behind again. Eventually Damon slowed enough for her to catch up.

"You almost made it, you know," he said.

Madeline looked at him. "What?"

"You were pretty close to the top. It wasn't that much farther."

She stopped walking.

For some reason, those words hurt more than if he had said nothing. Almost. She had been almost there. Close enough that someone stronger might have continued. Close enough that perhaps she should have pushed harder. Close enough to make stopping feel less like listening to her body and more like failing.

"I couldn't," she said.

Damon took another step before turning back toward her. "I know."

"My heart was racing really bad, Damon. And my feet felt like somebody was driving nails through them."

"I said I know."

His voice changed only slightly, but Madeline noticed. She knew every variation of Damon's irritation: the tightening around his mouth, the exhale through his nose, the small shift in his shoulders that warned her she was approaching the invisible line between acceptable and annoying.

Usually, that was when she changed course. She softened her voice, made a joke, apologized, changed the subject, or did whatever else was necessary to keep the peace. Today she was too tired.

"I don't think you do know," she said.

Damon stared at her. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I couldn't keep going. So why are you telling me how close I was?"

"I was trying to make you feel better."

"It doesn't."

His eyebrows lifted. "Okay."

There it was. The wall.

Madeline could feel herself beginning to retreat automatically. She should forget it. Tell him it was fine. Stop before a nice family day turned into another argument that would somehow become her fault.

Then she heard herself say, "You left me."

Damon frowned. "What?"

"You left me sitting there by myself."

"The kids wanted to finish the hike."

"I know."

"So what was I supposed to do?"

Madeline stared at him. That question appeared often in their marriage. What was he supposed to do? As if any need she had created an impossible situation for him. As if caring for her always required some unreasonable sacrifice.

"You could've stayed with me."

"And made everybody else turn around?"

"I didn't say everybody had to stay."

"So I'm supposed to stay behind while my family takes my kids up the trail?"

"They're my kids too."

"You know what I mean."

She did, and that was part of the problem.

Madeline looked down the trail. Everyone else had continued walking without noticing that she and Damon had fallen behind. "I didn't ask you to fix anything. I didn't ask you to carry me. I just wanted you to stay with me."

Damon looked at her as if he genuinely didn't understand what she was asking for.

"I was scared," she continued. "My heart was beating so hard I thought something might actually be wrong, and you just kept going."

"You didn't tell me you thought something was wrong."

"I told you I couldn't go any farther."

"That's not the same thing."

"Would it have mattered?"

His expression hardened. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Madeline almost answered. She almost told him that she had spent years wondering whether anything about her mattered to him unless it made his life easier. The words rose into her throat and stayed there.

The forest around them was impossibly green. Sunlight slipped between the branches and caught on the ferns lining the trail. Somewhere beyond the trees, the waterfall continued thundering over the cliff, indifferent to the two of them standing there.

"I don't know," she finally said.

Damon shook his head. "Here we go."

Madeline knew those three words well. They meant she was becoming emotional again. She was making something out of nothing. She was too sensitive, too needy, too much. She could feel herself shrinking before she'd consciously decided to.

"Forget it."

"Gladly."

Damon turned and continued down the trail.

Madeline stayed where she was for a moment, watching his back disappear farther away. Something about the sight felt familiar. Not this exact moment, but the feeling beneath it. She had spent so much of their marriage trying to catch up with him—working hard enough, helping enough, giving enough, needing less, complaining less, trying to become easier to love.

For the briefest moment, Madeline wondered what would happen if she stopped.

What if she stopped trying to catch people who could walk away without looking back?

The thought frightened her enough that she dismissed it immediately. She wasn't leaving Damon. She wasn't blowing up her family over a hike. She was tired, hurting, and embarrassed. Tired people had dramatic thoughts. That was all.

She started walking again.

By the time she reached the bottom, everyone was discussing where they should eat. One of the kids came over and took her hand, still excited about the view from above.

"Mom, you should've seen it."

Madeline squeezed the small hand in hers. "I know, baby. I'm glad you got to."

"Maybe next time you can come all the way."

Madeline looked toward the top of the falls. The water seemed impossibly far away from where she stood.

"Maybe next time," she said.

Later, someone suggested taking a family picture. They gathered in front of the waterfall, shifting positions until everyone fit into the frame. Damon stood beside Madeline. When the person holding the camera told them to move closer, he stepped toward her and put an arm around her.

To anyone who saw the photograph later, they would look happy. A family on a beautiful day together. Nobody looking at the picture would know that less than an hour earlier Madeline had sat alone on the side of the mountain while everyone she loved continued without her.

"Smile," the photographer called.

Madeline smiled, and the shutter clicked.

Years later, she would find that photograph and stare at the woman standing near the edge of the group. For a long time, Madeline would believe what disturbed her about the picture was her body—the weight she carried, the clothes she had chosen to hide inside, the exhaustion around her eyes. Eventually, she would understand that none of those things were what hurt.

What hurt was remembering how hard that woman had tried and how thoroughly she had learned to call herself a failure whenever her best wasn't enough for someone else.

But that realization belonged to another version of Madeline, one she had not met yet.

For now, she stood beneath Multnomah Falls with Damon's arm around her, smiling for a photograph that would preserve a happiness she did not feel. Somewhere high above her was the place she had desperately wanted to reach, and although she had climbed farther than she once believed she could, she could only think about the distance she had failed to finish.

Almost there, she thought as she looked toward the top.

For now, almost would have to be enough.