Time Travel and Other Benefits of Walking
By Faith Geiger
I started taking walks out of necessity. It was the spring of 2020, and for reasons I’m sure I don’t need to explain, I didn’t have a lot to do. The fact that there was nowhere to be meant I had to find somewhere to go. Plus, I had just recently been manipulated into liking coffee because of a TikTok trend, and I was not used to consuming so much caffeine. A nearly permanent buzzing sensation had become present in my body: part caffeine, part anxiety, part metaphormosis, I think. This buzzing was broken up by long periods of lethargy that I can only recall now as one endless scroll on my phone while my limbs were weighed down in my childhood bed. So I started walking because of the buzzing, and because I had to shake off the lethargy, and for another reason I can only explain as a compass that had formed in my chest, which pointed outside and down the street.
I would walk for hours. Every day my mother would ask, “Are you going on a walk soon?” and the answer would almost always be yes. Sometimes I took two walks—I think my record might have been four. I walked no matter the weather. Most days, I based the timing of my walks around whenever the Weather app told me it would be the sunniest, but sometimes, I walked in the rain and I enjoyed that, too. Most of the time that spring, I felt like I couldn’t see more than two inches in front of me. On my walks, though, I saw everything.
I have no real sense of direction, by which I mean I would have trouble telling you how to get to the nearest grocery store from my house—which I know is pitiful from an evolutionary standpoint and embarrassing for not only me but for anyone who has ever had to witness me try to get anywhere without using Google Maps, but that is all beside the point. The point is that direction didn’t matter on my walks. I trusted the compass in my chest.
For the most part, I rotated through three different routes that I acquired a sort of muscle memory for. These walks anchored me in sweet familiarity; I greeted my favorite houses and trees and corners, which served as markers of consistency and comfort when so little else around me seemed to be making sense. I realized, on one particularly sunny day, that I had seen one of the houses in a dream long before I had even walked past it for the first time.
But some days, the compass was pointing to something else entirely, something unreachable. On these days I walked with no plan. I left my body on autopilot, weaving up and down and around the present moment in an attempt to understand it and then break through it entirely, to walk straight into the future or, even better, stumble back into the comfort of the past.
One of the best walks I remember taking was one on which I rounded the corner of my street just as it began to drizzle. When I reached my doorstep, it started to pour. I sat on the stoop of the house I grew up in and had now returned to indefinitely and I watched the rain, and the mist of it made me cool and damp and I thought about divine timing and how this moment could’ve been the result of it. But it could have also just been the result of beautiful coincidence, which in my mind is just as sweet, maybe even sweeter, and maybe the same thing entirely.
When I moved back out of my parents’ house in the late summer, I was forced to find new routes in the town I had gone to college in—routes with more commotion. The momentum had started to return to the world, for better or for worse; people were spending more time milling around town and less time playing board games in their houses. The streets had lost their ghost-town feel, but I still found a sense of meditative solitude while walking them. I started timing my walks so that I could catch the sunset and watch the orange sky melt behind the sunflowers in the community garden. Taylor Swift released Folklore. Phoebe Bridgers released Punisher. When I listen to these albums now, I remember so clearly what it felt like to be caught in the limbo of that summer: the sweat beading on my forehead; the shaded path through the park by my house; the colors of the sky swelling in my chest; the world teasing—maybe even threatening—to pull me back into it. I remember the way the future was still so distant.
A year later, I already feel so far from the person I was when I walked that route. Life is nearly back in full swing, and these days, solitude feels less like a constant state of being and more like a luxury I need to remind myself to indulge in. So I do: I weave around my newest neighborhood with my headphones in, I take note of each house, I snap mental pictures of the streetlights on the corners. I breathe it all in so that a year from now I can remember how it felt to be this version of me: fumbling to find a way to meet myself in the middle of the last route and the next one.
Now, whenever I visit home, I take the same route I took nearly every day last spring, and my legs still remember exactly where to go. It is the most visceral type of time capsule: the compass buds in my chest, memories catch in my throat, and the buzzing returns to my hands. For a moment, I fall back into the past, where all around me there is nothing but brilliant stillness. ◆