Today I was sitting on a high top chair in the lobby of the YMCA when I saw her.
Her tangled, ashy brown hair falling like a mane down her skinny, spiny back. She leaned over the water fountain, her tiny chin straining outwards to catch a drink. She is 7. Maybe 8. Maybe older, but still small. There are scabs on her heels and knees. She is electric, she is anxious, she is wild.
My heart leaps when I see girls like this, girls who remind me of her. My camper. My camper whose sweet, beautiful name I can't say here on the awful, no-good internet.
Today was... a lot.
Today was the aftermath of yesterday, which was the aftermath of several years.
Yesterday I drove through the pre-dawn hours of the morning to work, where I arrived at 5AM. I unlocked the Y to leave the naked outdoor darkness for the warm buzz of a waking building. Like a zombie I completed my opening tasks. I listened to the dim eighties music trailing down from the upper level. I counted the cash drawer and yawned, subconsciously lulled by the distant whir of fans being turned on and machinery stirring. I love these early morning sounds, for too many years I have taken them for granted - the coffee machine growling, the computers softly humming, the lights whining above me.
Yesterday was a long day. The sun rose, people arrived, and I worked. I left my shift exhausted and immediately returned to bed, where I dreamed. My work clothes still on, sticking to my skin as I became damp and warm under my blankets and drifted deeper into sleepfulness.
In my dream, I was trying to "walk the loop" of the first summer camp I ever worked at.
In my memories now, I can clearly visualize passing the old swimming pool, the spider-webbed streetlights casting shadows on the gravel road, the lake blurred out in front of me, softly lapping closer and closer to my dusty ankles as I plod along.
But in my dream, I was lost. The path kept winding into strange places, new buildings rose around me and I was disoriented. I ducked to peer into tents where campers slept in an eerie silence. Through cabin window screens I saw the faint rising and falling of the colorful sleeping bags. It was peaceful, it was chilling, it was overwhelmingly real.
In all that dreamy, faded, surreal calm I felt panic.
I was looking for something or someone, but even in my dream I didn't know what it was.
This was one of those dreams where you travel so far back into the recesses of your mind that you wake up feeling completely foreign in your own life. I woke up in August 2019 and I didn't recognize the boring beige walls of my room or the strange eastern light filtering in through my blinds. I was still in my dream, where somehow a whole summer of camp had passed, and then suddenly I was driving along childhood streets towards the house I grew up in on Kanuga Road, where my mom, ageless and omnipotent as she often is in my dreams, said: "How was camp?" as I stepped onto the welcome mat, my sandals still soaked with lake water.
I was looking for her [my camper], I think, and I didn't even realize it until today when I saw that child leaning on the water fountain and I felt a flash of something through my subconscious.
I am a little bit homesick for camp. And by camp, I mean... ugh, I don't even know how to say it.
Camp is a strong thread in the tapestry of my story. Every summer, I have loved my children. I have nourished those young ones with stories, with art, with music, with attention and company and hugs and snacks and games. There are children who I will always remember fondly, some whom I am still scared of, and then there is that one child who somehow managed to rip my heart out and take it home with her.
I am sad.
Today, when I saw her, I felt a rush of emotions. It wasn't just camp. It wasn't just nostalgia, or my post-period hormones, or guilty regret for not going back to my children this summer. [Though I do very much regret that.]
It was everything. It was that love that overwhelmed me when I saw her today. I can safely say that she, that one wild, terrifying little girl, was the single most important person who taught me how to love myself and others.
[Of course, she's not the only one who did. But she's the most precious to me in my mind.]
So let's recap that.
Yesterday, I was sad.
Today, I saw her.
And it wasn't her. It was some other child, who after drinking her fill ran off to line up with the multitude of other small beings pattering about in the lobby, waiting to climb the rock wall.
But that split second where I thought it was her, or even just imagined what it would be like if it was her, overwhelmed me. I remembered what it was like to love something outside of myself so intensely - so purely - not the way I love lovers [ugh, men], or my books, or my own fantasies [hopes and daydreams, you know?] Something else.
I'll admit, this evening was difficult. I laid on my bed and let emotions swirl around me. My life today feels so terribly unfulfilling, unimportant, uninspired. I know this isn't true, but I feel it. I wake alone and I fall asleep alone. No matter how many people I talk to throughout the day, I ultimately come back to myself and my mind - and trust me, it's pretty scary in there sometimes.
And today I was just so deeply, deeply sad. I was reminded, when I saw her, of that aching feeling of love and longing. The feeling of something outside of your body and your own entity capturing you fiercely.
Is that love? That ache that brings you out of yourself?
It is a painful ache, a sweet one, one that simultaneously makes me want to give up but also to keep going. I must keep going. Because there is something outside me that I love.
At camp, I would read to my girls at night. I read A Wrinkle in Time, and only A Wrinkle in Time. I have read that book so many times that I have paragraphs of it memorized by heart. We must have read through the whole thing three times by the end of that summer and over the course of five different groups of girls.
Tonight, as I lay in bed feeling that desperate, sad, ache, I searched the internet for that book on tape. Because I want to be the camper. I want to lay in bed and listen to the story, to lose myself in the tale of Meg Murray, who was one of the main characters of my childhood, and who captured my campers each night with her boldness and her flaws.
I had to get a free trial of audible to accomplish this. Now I'm worried I won't remember to cancel it before I get charged out the wazoo on the 10th of each month.
But I got it, I got the audio book, and I laid there listening to the author with her raspy, grainy voice as she said the words I have read out loud so many times. It was cathartic. I watered my memories with my tears. I let myself ache. I let myself feel.
Then, I sat up. Suddenly. I felt overwhelmed with an urge I haven't felt in months - and haven't felt this strongly in well over a year.
To write.
And I did - I am. And putting words to this ache, putting on paper the strange dreamy fragments of my mind feels so good.
Writing is a way to love. To honor. To sustain. I am glad I have returned to it tonight, when I needed it so very much.
I will fall asleep to the sound of Madeleine L'Engle reading outloud, and I hope my campers are out there, sleeping soundly also.
And I will write again soon.
I will try to capture that ache that brings me out of myself, because I need it to love those around me now. There are campers, little beings who need love, inside so many grown-ups. There are men I know who need their hearts watered with tears. There are women who need stories to soothe them. There is a camp counselor in me longing to nourish the world, and there is a camper in me who needs nourishment.
I will never stop writing about camp.
I will never stop writing.
I will never stop.
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