Searching for Sherwin Williams

Desperation: When you are willing to risk your life in shark-infested waters in search of freedom. When you steal a piece of bread to stop your children from crying. When you fantacize about going home and throwing away all your worldly posessions because you feel the load on your back will be lighter because of it.

I´m a city girl. It´s becoming more apparent the more I am on this walk. The sun on my skin, the blisters on my feet, the fact that asphault feels like a relief to me when everyone else says that it´s harder to walk on. I wasn´t cut out for this thing, but still, it´s a priviledge to do it and I intend on taking every opportunity I can in order to enjoy it.

At about 10am this morning I was over it. I was done, all that I wanted to do was to take a hot bath, walk into Massage Envy, throw down my credit card and have them massage me til my skin fell off. Today was hard. Not quite as painful as day two had been, but it was certainly the second-hardest day. I almost chucked my boots into a rivine.

The only thing that I bought in person and not therough the internet were my boots. I walked into REI and told the man what I was doing, what the terrain consisted of and what it was all about. He sais he was familiar. He recommended the boots I bought over the nicer-feeling, softer ones, because he said that they would protect my feet from outside peril. What he didn´t say was that they would destroy my feet on the inside in the process.

I am now up to 12 blisters (and that´s not counting the new ones forming under the ones I already have). Somewhere aroung 2pm the pain starts. By 3pm the pain is so bad that the width of my steps decreases by half and I have to take twice as many to get to where I´m going.

But all the people around me are incredibly nice. Everyone is concerned for my feet and gasp whenever they see their state. I figure that before they see them they think I exagerate the condition. So when Ihear gasps of horror, I see that they get why I walked hunched over.

I was going to mail my boots to Madrid, but someone told me there is rain coming and I should keep them at hand. So tomorrow I will try out walking all day in my sneakers and see if that helps.

As I walked, I thought of my old job at the lawfirm, where I would sit all day at my desk and had a paint bucked under my table for when my legs hurt so that I could my feet up. I don´t think anyone in the history of the world has missed a paint bucket, and if they have, it wasn´t as much as I did today.

I look like complete crap in all my pictures, fat, sweaty, red-faced. I don´t think I´ve ever wanted to wear make-up this much in my life. I almost want to make a promise to the patron saint of Cuba and patron of all things girlie that I will fix my hair and put on make up every day, but then I remember that that usually comes with heels... then I change my mind.