Will I be a PCT widow?

The Man is planning to hike the PCT! He is being very vague about whether he'll be gone for 5 weeks or 5 months.

I'm looking forward to driving him to Campo, hopefully meeting him in Warner Springs and making little care packages to send him. I'm looking forward to being able to share the experience I had with him. It's already begun. He made fun of me for wanting to weigh all my gear but now he totally understands!

Best of all, I can sense The Change happening. At least I hope so.

For years before hiking the PCT I had been coasting through life waiting for a shoe to drop. I just had this feeling like something might change. We almost moved to Georgia once. It seemed like maybe we might move to Indiana or who knows where else. The Man was looking for a job and all the jobs he was finding were elsewhere.

He got fired and for a few months he was out of work. He seemed so happy then. He went back to the same job and all his stress came back. Since I had a good job I kept trying to tell him that if he needed to spend time not working so he could find a better job, I would help out. I kept hoping for a change, waiting for a change, believing and worrying with him when he'd come home saying he was sure he was going to get fired. But nothing changed. So I went hiking.

One of my goals for hiking was to enact some change. Maybe if The Man saw me doing something wonderful and being happy he would want to do something like that, too.

Now here he is planning to do something wonderful and I can feel his happiness growing. I asked him today, what if he comes back from the hike and doesn't want to work anymore? He just laughed and said then I would have to support him. Of course I never could do that, so it's more like I sense that he's relaxing about life and the future and seeing that maybe it is true that everything really does work out okay and that it is better to live life fully in the present than to suffer in pain hoping for a better tomorrow that may never come.

I may be making more out of this than there is. He may just be going for a quick 5 week hike. I'll pick him up in Kennedy Meadows or wherever and he'll go back to his job. But I know that even 5 weeks will change things. He'll be so much happier, so much more grounded, more creative, and more alive with the knowledge of where the hole in the fence is and how to get back to that place where he can be free.