In Spanish, the word for pilgrim is peregrino, though this is not its only meaning. Peregrino is also strange and absurd as well as fleeting, transitory. Strange and absurd made sense to me, for a pilgrim had to be a little weird to choose the blisters, leg pain, and cumulative fatigue that inevitably accompanied days of walking in the hot Spanish sun. But fleeting? This other meaning, I decided, would take time to reveal itself.

Onward, from the jewel-like St. Jean Pied-de-Port through Roncesvalles I walked, immediately grateful for the gentle curves of the Pyrenees, and the mild temperatures. To guide me, a yellow scallop shell, the official sign of the pilgrim, adorned trees, telephone poles, even the corners of buildings.

Six days into a pilgrimage I had begun on a remarkably mild first day of August, I left the mountains for the softer rise and fall of Navarre. It was outside the village of Estella that I misread one of the yellow signs and wound up straying a good eight kilometers from the Camino before realizing that I was heading east, back into the mountains, instead of west toward Santiago.

According to the medievals, the pilgrim shed her former self en route to Santiago, the sins or at least the baggage vanishing with the sweat and excess pounds. By walking west, a person walked out of herself. The old self must die for the new self to be born, the Compostela said.

And what did I need to shed? The tear-streaked face of the twenty-four-year-old woman who stood before a candlelit altar at the university chapel and vowed to love, honor, and cherish Ian—a man I had met during my first year of college—until death do us part. Ian, a man who had walked with me through the Alps of Austria; but also a man who had become someone strange to me, someone in whom I could no longer recognize my own face. Until death do us part.

By the time I reached the auberge (pilgrim’s hostel) in the village of Viana, it was pitch dark. The dinner had already been served, and there were no leftovers. As for the beds, each and every one had been claimed. My faulta meant that I had to dine on a gristly hunk of cheese and some hard bread. Worse yet, my only sleeping option became a tent with three Spaniards, all of whom were named Jesus and all of whom snored.

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