This is in many ways great writing - spoiler alert - THE END
When we’d stopped laughing and turned around, Lantivet Bay was below us, and beyond that the familiar sight of Pencarrow Head. We walked painfully slowly, stopping to look around every few minutes, excited to get to the end but willing it not to come. That night, not some disconnected night in some possible future, but that night we would unpack our rucksacks and unroll our sleeping bags on an unknown floor. Over the next few weeks we would sell off most of our remaining possessions to pay for a hire van to move what little we needed to Polruan. Moth would begin a degree without any real hope of surviving to the end of it. I would look for a job and start writing. And out of thin air, out of loss and pain and fear, we would be as happy as we were when we were twenty.
When it couldn’t be delayed any longer we walked over Pencarrow Head. Our homeless trail was over. We sat on a bench overlooking Lantic Bay, our rucksacks propped together, and shared the last of a pack of wine gums. The peregrine swooped close by, following the line of the cliff down towards the bay before soaring back up and out of sight.
A figure appeared out of the gorse, wearing the same coat and hat he had a year ago, walking with the same stick.
‘She’s been back a week now. She’d gone same day you were las’ year. Knew you were comin’, told them all you were comin’, that she were bringin’ you back. It’s a sign, i’n’ it.’
He headed slowly away to the road as the sun began to drop on the horizon and the mist lifted in the hollows.
We hadn’t been afforded the luxury of time for the shockwaves from our past to play out and then – as in any good nature-redemption story – to go off into the wilderness to refind our way in life. Bad things had hit us in the face like a tidal wave and would have washed us away if we hadn’t found ourselves on the path. Our journey had drained us of every emotion, sapped our strength and our will. But then, like the windblown trees along our route, we had been re-formed by the elements into a new shape that could ride out whatever storms came over the bright new sea. I thought about the two teenagers wrapped up in the essence of each other, of a passion that had lasted for most of my life, of heavy rain and burning sun, of a peregrine soaring free on the thermals of the cliff edge, of two molecules that were held together by little more than an electrical charge, a charge that had been strong enough to form a powerful bond, but a bond that one day soon might break. At last I understood what homelessness had done for me. It had taken every material thing that I had and left me stripped bare, a blank page at the end of a partly written book. It had also given me a choice, either to leave that page blank or to keep writing the story with hope. I chose hope.
I had no idea what the future would bring, how it would be shaped by the months spent living wild on the Coast Path. All I knew was that we were lightly salted blackberries hanging in the last of the summer sun, and this perfect moment was the only one we needed.