On day six of the Camino de Santiago, Robin Williams committed suicide in his home in Tiburon, California. I read the NYT article on my phone with bad hostel Wi-Fi at 5:30 am in a medieval village called Torres del Río. I thought of him in the cultural repertoire of our generation: Mrs. Doubtfire, Dead Poets Society, Good Morning Vietnam. The obituary discussed his depression, cocaine habit and alcoholism. It quotes him saying: “the only cure you have right now is the honesty of going, this is who you are.”

I paid for my cafe con leche, zipped my phone away, and set out through the dark fields. At daybreak I saw the silhouette of Japanese Jesus, a shaggy haired Asian man who, his wife by his side, was walking the entire Camino barefoot. The wife had fair skin and straight bangs and nodded with every syllable she spoke (Ho-laa, she’d say. God-bless-you.) She sat on a rock some way ahead and waited patiently as he, impassible, pressed slow, tedious footprints into the dirt. I nodded hello and bypassed them. It was impossible to look at him. I wanted to ask: doesn’t it already hurt enough?

Pilgrimages really haven’t changed since the Middle Ages. This is why we do it. One kind of pain expurgates another.

*

The first time I felt in love, I was sitting on a balcony on Ha’Aliya Street, in Tel Aviv. I was eighteen. I read and wrote thousand-word emails every morning, counting down the days until our reunion. He had, it turned out, been busy with other things that summer, other people. I was mistakenly obstinate that the pain of betrayal would lessen if we worked harder. Being together was miserable, being apart unthinkable.

The initial devastation paled, I suppose, compared to the long decline that followed. Independent from its catalyst, sadness took its own hold. It would surge, with no precursors, anytime and anywhere—later afternoons alone in a room, out at parties, during Anna Karenina (bad movie to watch), between the German and Slavic Languages isles of the Strand Bookstore. Worse, though, were the five seconds of post-wake up daze where consciousness had not yet fully kicked in and I felt fine.

A year later, one July morning, I lay slumped across my bed and typed down the following lines:

I think that a clichéd philosophy is true: that mess is beautiful, and that a flawed life is, somehow, also the way things ought to be.

I read these words out loud to myself again and again. I tried to draw reassurance from their evasive wisdom. I remembered how, one Halloween, I decided to be Amy Winehouse, who had died of alcohol poisoning earlier that year. I traced dramatic cat-eyes with black gel liner, poofed up my hair, stacked silver chains around my neck, and wore minuscule acid-washed cut-off jeans. I had more shots than I could keep track of with ten fingers. Unlike her, I did manage to wake up the next morning.

But what if.

What if. Those have always been the words: what if she is lost, what if she is hurt, what if she never comes back.

With time, the sadness eventually faded. A year later, on that August afternoon on the bus to St. Jean, it was the relief that peace now existed not in spite of pain but because pain was entirely absent that took me by surprise, and bestowed me with a joy that I can only describe as gratitude.

*

Childhood was different. Back then, we alchemized the banal into the sublime, candy into caviar, blocks of Lego into the Venus de Milo. Until the age of eight, I insisted that every birthday meal be held at McDonald’s. I found obscene delight in alternating bites of my double cheeseburger with sips of strawberry milkshake. Once, I hid in the staircase and bitterly bawled for a good hour, positively crushed after being denied the fries sizzling in my grandmother’s deep fryer.

But how quickly rage transformed into ecstasy with a simple trip to the river, where we surfed down banks of velvety algae and crawled against the current of the falls, pretending to be crocodiles. Or with excursions to provençal markets on Wednesday mornings, where we zoomed between stands of marinated olives, African drums and made-in-China knickknacks, torn by the indecision of how to spend the five-euro bill we held crumpled in our palms.

Joy, then, came easily, and was not that distinguishable from mere pleasure. It was carnal and sensory, our capacity for it not yet marred by private disappointments or heartbreaks. Older, wearier, we buy vintage vinyl records that we shelve away and admire in nocturnal secrecy, the way our younger selves lovingly examined our action figure collection before climbing into bed. We plan trips to New York and Las Vegas to be dazzled again by the furious blinking of carnivalesque lights. We turn to chemical substances to feel the tingle under our skin we are terrified of having lost, and to lose the melancholia we are terrified of having found.

We say “let’s get fucked up” and hope for the opposite: that it’ll all be frivolous fun; that infinite possibilities are at hand; that everyone will be novelesque, grand, and beautiful. Rivers and markets and knickknacks become dark rooms and strobe lights; fries are still fries. Injuries of all kinds occur. We fumble and suddenly there it is — joy, or pain, or the long absence of both. Learning that none of the three can exist without the other two is, perhaps, what makes us no longer children.

*

Solitude is a splendid drug. After the Camino, I could not stop walking. I went to the beach in Barcelona and lay my towel in a sea of oily bodies and every oily body probably thought I was with another. I got lost in the hills of Montjuic and stumbled upon empty, colossal stadiums built for the 1992 Olympics. I felt solid, persistent sanity. My removal from any vulnerability to others was total and absolute.

The British writer Edward St. Aubyn once said that terrorized abstinence is, in the end, as much of a defeat as self-destruction. Solitude topples into loneliness. Walking away ceases to be an evasion of life but life itself, with its own perils and promises.

On my last night of the Camino I stayed up talking to a young Irish man who had walked from Barcelona, where he lived alone, teaching English. He did not like eye contact. He’d left Ireland for reasons he had quietly mumbled in the buzz of a dining room, and even though I heard only tidbits I could understand that he’d been walking for a long time. We sat in the dark courtyard for a while and he smoked. Eventually the inn keeper herded us inside for curfew. We stood at the threshold of the kitchen and the bathroom, the only place we were allowed to be. We hugged.

“Buen camino,” I said. Then I added: “Good-bye.”

He reminded me of the mythical walkers on the Camino who abandon modern societal life and continue the hike, year after year after year, living off the charity of churches and villagers on the way. They speed ahead of a world that never catches up, leaving behind cities full of potential lovers, menaced plans, and thwarted dreams. These are pains they will never know, bypassed buds of malevolence that will unfurl for another.

I cannot envy them. Most of us cannot give up so much. We get off the bus with our straw hats and shepherd’s sticks and pilgrims’ shells, walk alone for a while, and then face the certainty of return. We may hold onto isolation even when we are back in worlds familiar to us, piling on human interactions where we expect nothing and give nothing, never feeling hurt and never feeling loved. Until one day we wake up too late with bed sheets that smell different and a crippling migraine, disoriented and defeated, because we do not know where, in our effort to pursue joy, we must draw the line between recreation and re-creation, between the invincibility of indifference and the risk of investment. But, for now, we lie still and are thankful for the absence of pain.

*

Originally published on Medium’s Culture Club collection