tender heart, tender tootsies

My heart feels as tender as my feet did not long ago. While my feet have healed—miraculously—my heart seems to be just as badly blistered and bruised as my poor feet once were. Every wrong pinch sends shoots of pain all throughout my body. It blinds me until I am shaking, unable to see anything clearly, especially myself.

For the first three days of the camino, I wore the wrong shoes and it almost made me quit, honestly. To this day I’m really unsure how I continued to walk across Spain on the damaged, infected, and dramatically blistered feet that I had for a month. When my sister and I arrived in Pamplona we went to an outdoor store designed specifically for pilgrims walking the camino. The guy working there was from Germany and had been a pilgrim himself years before. He took one look at my feet and said “oh no, this is so bad.'“ “It hurts so bad! Please help me.” I walked out of that store with two hundred euros less in my pocket, yet with much more confidence than I had walking in. I knew I could finish this, it wasn’t an option for me not to. And while I spent more time and money taking care of my feet than I would’ve liked, I still walked across Spain. Not with perfect feet, not even slightly damaged feet, but feet that oozed and bled and pussed every single day. And my heart was more full than it had ever been.

Heartache is such an interesting word. I mean it literally describes a feeling so well, it’s difficult to find another phrase that could outperform such imagery. But the levels of heartache are what really leave me puzzled. My heart aches when I see a stray dog looking for pets. My heart aches when I watch a husband say goodbye to his wife of fifty seven years. My heart aches when I think about my past and the ways in burns into my present. Yet heartache doesn’t seem to do enough justice to the genuinely raw feeling of living with what I’ve gone through everyday. But my heart doesn’t break every time—so what’s the term for what I feel? Why can’t my greatest confidants—words—help me now.