Cover

ALSO BY JENNIFER LONGO

Six Feet Over It

Up to This Pointe

Dedication

This one is for Maudi.

Epigraph

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness.

—John Muir, in a letter to his wife, Louie, July 1888, Life and Letters of John Muir

Chapter One

YOU WILL NEVER, IN ALL YOUR LIFE, meet a person who packs a better suitcase than I do, and I’ll tell you right now, the secret is not organization—it is simplification. Get rid of your crap. Do not own things in the first place. Surrender the weight of what you carry and the wild, wide world is yours.

Pack. Light.

Which sounds easy—“when in doubt, go without” and all that—but to achieve true freedom you must be brutal as a consumer. Is dental floss on sale two for one? Don’t fall for it—one extra thing taking up room to pack and repack, and, besides that, what if your teeth all fall out before you ever need to use it? Now you’re the dummy hauling around extra floss for no reason.

Yes, floss. Insignificant weight until you add it to that pen you bought, the T-shirt you had to have, the non-travel-sized thing of shampoo, until one day you wake up dragging the weight of a rolling suitcase taller and heavier than your own body and you’re exhausted trying to keep track of all these things you’ve convinced yourself you need—Where did I leave that? Did someone take the other? Why can’t I find my socks underneath all these stupid boxes of floss? Trapped.

My packing credentials were passed to me from my namesake and honed since my birth, straight into foster care and never adopted. The longest I’ve lived in any house is eleven months, and now I am seventeen years old, so you do the math.

At school people sometimes ask me what it’s like to live this way, which, I suppose for kids who lost or were removed from a family they once lived with and maybe loved, is a legit question, but for me is like asking a person born blind what it’s like to not see—it’s not like anything. I’ve got no objective context because I was left newborn, nameless, cord still attached, and jonesing for meth at John Muir Medical Center in California. A “foundling.” When no one came to claim me, the NICU nurses named me for him; Child Protective Services let them put Muiriel on my birth certificate, and I have grown into it.