Summer Camp : Part Three

it smells like smoke in here / and the piano doesn't play, it never did / and there's this feeling I get when you're in the room I want you to stay

Part One | Part Two

the treehouse and the velvet sky

The flowers that arrived yesterday, on my thirty-sixth birthday, sit on the bookshelf in my office. They are darkly sumptuous, wintery in a way that gives off a little heat. The note that came tucked inside the stems is pinned up on the corkboard above my desk as I write.

The ocean between us is stupid, but how lucky we are to have met.

Usually the reserve of lovers, words like this have become entwined in the everyday language of true friendship. I wrote in my last essay about struggling to fit in and find my people as I move through life. It’s a feeling that clings to me as I walk my children across the school playground in the mornings or stand apart at a kids’ birthday party, my four-year-old barrelling, ruddy-cheeked, around the wipe-clean soft play. I don’t do well with small talk or surface level chitchat, especially so when it circles around a sanitised version of motherhood. And don’t misunderstand me there – being a mother is the most beautifully messy, urgent, complex unravelling I have experienced. But that truth is almost entirely erased by the saccharine niceties exchanged over bitter coffee as our children scatter in circles.

And so, I would mostly rather just remain invisible. Or at least unknowable. You want to talk about yourself? I will be your captive audience obscured in the half-light while your voice echoes around us.

Most people will allow me to do just that because, honestly, they prefer to bathe in the sound of their own voice. But you know who I could not get away with that around? A handful of writers gathered in the dew-damp grass underneath a crooked treehouse, the sky a velvet blanket above our heads, covered in a thousand tiny pinpricks that turned out to be the entire universe.

*

Monica picked me up in Chicago exactly when she said she would. In a series of messages sent in the hours before we met, she had told me the make and model of her car, the details of the number plate, that I would see a Snoopy bumper sticker. My anxiety, so extreme in unfamiliar situations, exhaled with each breadcrumb that led me out to the hotel parking lot.

Her car was spotless and in the footwell there was a cool bag filled with sparkling water, shiny red apples, and protein bars. Monica is a planner and a nurturer, and I could rest easy in that knowledge from the moment we met.

Trish was already in the front passenger seat, having taken a very early flight in from Florida. She was quiet on the drive, pensive but quick as a cat, the twinkle in her eyes betraying a sharp sense of humour that timed itself exactly right.

I have reflected now about how, because of the kindness shown to me on that journey from a city I had never visited before to a remote camp beside a lake, I withdrew from those two women. Writing it down now, I can see the upside-down sprawl of my thoughts, but at the time it made complete sense.

Because, you see, I have realised that it’s more than not wanting to be seen. It’s not wanting to be seen needing. God forbid anyone would think I, a woman thousands of miles from home amongst strangers who put heavy whipping cream in their coffee, could maybe use a friend.

After that car ride, I didn’t want Monica or Trish to think they had to take care of me. I was so sure they would resent my lingering presence when there were so many other interesting people to meet, so many conversations to have. Self-sufficiency was the wall I built to protect myself.

*

Each evening as a dark curtain was pulled over the bright sky, we laid our mats in a circle and let the echoing song that signalled rest begin to wash over us. By the third night, I had learned to wear my thick woollen socks to yoga nidra, the warmth of the day having sunk into the earth, leaving me shivering.

I drifted off, became weightless, as Billie asked us to scan our bodies, and only floated back to awareness when they brought the practice to a close. I let my cold eyelids open and stared up at the whispering leaves in silhouette against the charcoal sky.

I felt tiny under those tall trees. I felt tiny and electric and the magic of it all caught in my throat. That starry inhale, burning my lungs so sweetly as I kept my eyes fixed skyward, like holding smoke. I thought about how, in the hardest moments – back pressed against a locked bathroom door, skin yielding under sharp metal, bloodshot eyes collapsing into dark hollows as the baby cried somewhere nearby – even survival had felt impossible.

Bodies around me began to unfold, stretching slowly, some sitting and some already rolling away their mats. My face was wet with tears.

I looked to my left and saw Juliane, beautiful and glassy eyed in the twilight.

When people talk about love at first sight, they mostly mean it in the romantic sense. But have you ever felt the thunderclap of being known in an instant by someone who isn’t afraid to climb over the wall and get their fingernails dirty in the mud trying to find you?

I’ve been burned before by the stray sparks of something that felt like magic but turned out only to be a trick – the plastic bunch of flowers inside a top hat, the stream of colourful handkerchiefs flowing from a sleeve – so I approached with caution. So often in friendships I turn out to be the striker paper to the other person’s match, the oxygen quickly sucked from the room as I take my seat in the audience.

But there was a moment in the treehouse that could only hold four people at a time, but mostly just held the two of us, where I told Juliane something about my mother. About, how, out of spite, she had taken away my final chance to see my grandpa when he died. In the end I became self-conscious of the sound of my own voice and told her I was sorry for boring her. She tilted her head, half-smile and furrowed brow, and said, “I believe in reciprocal relationships.”

Reciprocal relationships.

She told me that if she had found it boring, listening to me open up about something so painful, that would have made her an asshole. And, honestly, that had never crossed my mind.

When I was young, a few sentences into any anecdote, my mother would sigh and say, “is this a long story?”. Those words still seize my jaw every time I think of speaking, even as I shuffle through my thirties.

It shouldn’t have been a revelation, this idea of reciprocity, but it was. And so, when we stood in that field, eyes spilling over, and she told me – honest and raw – that she was trying to stop disappearing herself, I still didn’t truly know how to give anything of myself in return.

Instead, I fought like a caged animal. I struggled and deflected and resisted. Still, she stood there, waiting patiently. Eventually, the fight all gone from my body, I managed to stitch a sentence together that felt true enough. The words, it turned out, didn’t matter much in the end because she knew, she saw it, how that great big midwestern sky had cracked me wide open.

*

On the last morning, Monica slid into the driver’s seat and Trish took her spot up front. We turned nostalgic, quick as a flash, and reminisced like people do when they have lived through something together but from different vantage points. I realised, through the mirror we held up to one another, that it would have been okay to stick close to them. We were all so self-conscious about being too much (writers? Surely not.) that we missed out on valuable time getting to know one another. A lesson learned.

In the months since then, I have let that night sky expand behind my ribcage. I remain a work-in-progress in articulating my feelings in real time, but that idea of reciprocity has become my north star. Tears sit closer to the surface. Skin is thinner. I am learning to step out of the shadows.

*

Those camp friendships – and there were more than I have had space to describe here – worked like an enchantment on my brain chemistry. Whenever the tendrils of doubt creep in, about my worth or my sense of self, I can now always know that I am a person who flew across an ocean, grasped the hand that was offered, and jumped – eyes closed – into the shimmering lake.

Photo by Becca Stanley