The Air We Share

I pushed open the door, its hinges announcing my arrival with a squeak that echoed through the stone stairwell. Carlos, the hostel host, had sent a poorly transcribed text message earlier with instructions for the lockbox and a cryptic note warning there would be "another guest." He hadn't elaborated on age, nationality, or sex, which I was choosing to interpret as charmingly minimalistic rather than ominous, mostly because my legs were too tired to care.

The apartment was small but had high ceilings and plaster walls that held the cool mountain air. A tiny galley kitchen to the right, a communal living space to the left with a boxy TV from the nineties and an acoustic guitar in the corner that someone had clearly loved. Two sets of floor-to-ceiling windows opened onto a concrete terrace overlooking the Spanish mountainside in the deep purples and golds of late afternoon.

I felt it before I saw it...that specific awareness of being watched. I turned toward the dark hallway and found two doors. One was pressed just barely closed. Not wide open, not completely shut. Just cracked an inch, which is somehow infinitely more communicative than open or shut.

Hello to you too, I thought.

I found my room, "the one marked 2," per Carlos's text, and the moment my feet hit the floorboards, I heard quick footsteps next door followed by the snap of canvas curtains being drawn across the windows, cutting off their side of the shared terrace view.

Normally this would have bothered me. I grew up in a small town in Ohio where you say hello to strangers in grocery store aisles, on sidewalks, and in dentist waiting rooms. If someone walks into a shared space and you don't at least poke your head out and offer a five-minute round of pleasantries, people talk about it. It's considered a minor social crime.

But the Camino had been teaching me little lessons, like this, for the past six days. Everyone out here is on their own journey, and those journeys look nothing alike. Some people are walking to celebrate retirement, some are looking for God, and some are running from a ghost or a marriage. If my neighbor needed to pull the curtains against the world, that was their business.

I peeled off my socks, stiff with a combination of blister fluid and dried sweat, and had just wrapped myself in a towel when the door next door quietly clicked open. Quick steps across the tile. The shower ran. Shit. I was really hoping for a shower.

I sat on the edge of the bed and waited.

The shower stopped. Steps back across the hall. A door clicked shut.

I took my turn, scrubbed away nineteen miles of dust, dried off, ate a smashed Clif bar from the bottom of my backpack, and went to sleep before I could form another thought.

Morning on the Camino arrives before you're ready for it. I was up before six, reassembling my backpack in the dark with hyper-vigilant care, trying not to make noise.

Next door, the same sounds had already started. The rip of Velcro, the rustle of a sleeping bag being wrestled into a compression sack. The quiet grunt of frustration when a buckle refuses to snap on the first try. We were mirror images, two strangers performing the same ritual in isolation, separated by four inches of plaster.

I was lacing my shoes in the kitchen when she appeared.

She stopped short when she saw me. Older than me by maybe twenty-five years. Alaskan, I would eventually learn. Her backpack was massive, a sixty-liter monster that was far too large for her petite frame, that she carried with a stiff posture. Her eyes studied the floorboards, the coffee pot, anything but mine.

"Morning," she said with no inflection.

"Morning," I said back. I kept my Midwestern chipperness in check.

We moved around each other in the tiny kitchen with the polite coordination of two people sharing a space they have no intention of sharing for long. I filled the coffee pot; she reached for the grounds. We stood at the counter and drank our bitter, black coffee in silence.

"I was told about a ferry crossing at the river this morning," I said. "The guidebook says it's the better route. Cuts some time off and the views are nicer, if you want to head down together."

She paused, mug halfway to her lips. She didn't look at me, but she nodded once. "I might grab another coffee first. Somewhere in town. Before the dock."

"Okay, well, maybe I'll see you down there," I said.

"Yeah, maybe," she said with a small forced smile.

I threw on my backpack and headed out into the cool, misty morning alone.

The ferry dock sat at the edge of a sleepy, stone-walled village. The river was wide and black in the early light, covered in fog so thick the far bank, in Spain, was invisible. A few other pilgrims milled around the wooden pier, all of us doing that specific thing where you study the horizon to avoid initiating a conversation you don't have the energy to maintain.

And then, out of the fog: there she was.

She came down the cobblestone path, her heavy pack bouncing against her lower back, looking exactly as surprised and mildly annoyed to see me as I felt seeing her. We both offered a small, involuntary smile - the kind that means of course, you're here. She settled along the railing a few feet away. The ferry moved, and Spain appeared slowly through the lifting mist.

When the ramp dropped on the opposite shore, we stepped off at the same time and started walking in the same direction, which was the only direction. The trail immediately narrowed into a single-track path hemmed in by ancient stone walls.

Two male pilgrims were already ahead of us at a steady pace. They weren't looking back, weren't giving off any particular energy; they were just walking. But the path wound deep into an isolated forest where the canopy blocked out the sun and the air was dead quiet.

There's a permanent, low-grade risk calculation that women do in situations like this that's so constant and automatic you don't notice it until the adrenaline hits. You measure distances, look for exits, calculate pace. I noticed it now. I looked over my shoulder at the Alaskan woman walking twenty steps behind me.

She was looking at the two men ahead, too. Her chin was down, eyes sharp and focused. She was running the same math.

I slowed my stride until she caught up. We walked side by side, elbows nearly brushing in the narrow corridor.

"You don't have to talk," I said quietly, keeping my eyes on the trail so she wouldn't feel cornered. "We can just walk."

She stopped dead. I turned around. She looked at me with a mix of surprise and suspicion, as if I'd spoken to her in a language she didn't think anyone else knew.

"I just mean," I said, "I'm happy to walk with you...for company," I added awkwardly, "you don't have to make conversation or pleasantries...we can just..." (unsure how I cooked this next part up)... "share the air."

She stood in the middle of the path and considered this. Her hands tightened around her pack straps. She searched my face for some hidden agenda. Finding none, she nodded once - a single, decisive drop of her chin - adjusted her hip belt, and fell into step beside me.

We walked for four hours without saying a word.

Around midday, the trail reached a high grassy hill overlooking a valley dotted with tiny red-roofed villages. A weathered bench sat beneath a massive oak tree. Without a word or a plan, we both gradually slowed to a stop.

We dropped our backpacks into the grass with identical sighs and sat down. I had a bruised apple and a block of cheap cheese. She had crackers and a tin of sardines. We ate in silence, looking out at the ancient valley. She offered me a cracker, and I offered her a chunk of cheese.

She wiped her fingers on her hiking pants and looked at the distant mountains.

"I'm Sharon," she said. Her voice was scratchy from hours of silence.

"Molly."

That was all. We packed up our trash and kept walking.

We found a tiny restaurant tucked down an alleyway off the main plaza that evening. Dim, warm, smelling of roasted garlic and olive oil. Rough stone walls, candles, a three-course pilgrim meal for ten euros. The waiter brought a ceramic pitcher of house red wine without being asked.

We were past the part where you have to perform.

I told her I was from Ohio, that I worked in digital marketing, that I had come to Spain on a desperate whim that had been building in my chest for a couple of years ... something somewhere between a vacation and an existential crisis.

Sharon listened without interrupting, without nodding superficially, without waiting for her turn to speak. I could feel her absorbing the words.

When it was her turn to speak, she said, "I had a son."

The past tense landed between us like a weight, resting next to the bread basket. "He died three years ago."

She said it the way people say things they've been forced to say many times but haven't gotten used to saying. His name was Ethan. He was twenty-four. He was loud and funny and made friends with everyone, everywhere, which had driven her crazy when he was little because she could never get him to leave a park or a grocery store without a twenty-minute round of goodbyes.

She smiled when she said that. A small, real smile. The first one I had seen from her.

"You remind me of him," she said. "The way you talk. And the way you just..." She gestured vaguely in my direction. "He couldn't stand to see someone carrying something alone."

I didn't say anything. My instinct was to fill the silence with something comforting. The Camino had taught me better.

"I almost didn't come," Sharon said. "I don't do things like this. I don't buy plane tickets alone or hike across mountains, and I definitely don't talk to people I don't know." She paused. "But Ethan would have done all of it without thinking twice. He would have known every pilgrim by name."

"You learned my name," I said.

She looked up, surprised, and laughed.

"I think I needed to learn how to do this," she said. "How to let someone walk next to me without running away." A faint smile. "I couldn't have done what we did today six days ago. I would have run into the bushes."

I thought about the door pressed just barely closed. The quick footsteps scurrying to the shower. The way she'd handed me the word morning like a piece of glass she expected me to drop.

"You did it today, though," I said.

She looked at the pitcher of wine for a long moment.

"I did," she agreed.

At the street corner where our paths split, she stopped under an iron streetlamp and turned to face me.

"Thank you, Molly," she said.

She pulled me into a tight, brief hug. The kind of hug that seals something between two people who've survived something together.

I stood on that damp stone corner after she walked away, feet throbbing, shoulders bruised, blisters on top of blisters.

I didn't become a different person on the Camino. I didn't find God or forgive anyone or solve whatever I'd been carrying. But I walked next to an Alaskan woman named Sharon for a few hours on a Tuesday in May.

She told me about her son, and she laughed once, small, sharp, and completely real, at a wooden table in a town whose name I never learned.

But I learned his. Ethan.