camp

Sometimes I feel as if some of the crazy is wearing off on me too.

Day one was a blur. The entirety of those few hours seemed to be spinning in endless circles with no sign of night to come. A boy standing at least 6’5 on a busy beach yells out subway routes in New York City, layered between excited shrieks of campers and concerned cries of redundant counsellors. A smaller boy with empty eyes is told not to touch the girls, but to ask a question first, a bald boy yells angrily at his foot. The air seems heavy with desperation and looming sense of doom; a result of those unprepared despite the seemingly endless training for this day. Everyone is frantic, everyone yells, and everything spins until my head hits the pillow, and I am greeted by sweet blackness.
Morning. I realize with agony that this is not a dream, and I am not back in the safety of my bed. Can I handle this? The task is an ominous monster looming ahead, and it is going to fucking eat me.
Behind me, gentle snoring penetrates my vulnerable ears. In front of me, there are short halting words, slurred and difficult to decipher from each other. Something smells foul somewhere, and it seems as if any sort of privacy is nothing more than wishful thinking. Can’t I just retreat right now? The entirety of my being wants nothing more than to curl up in a hole somewhere and escape everything that is summer camp.
Breakfast. Everyone chomps merrily on slices of soggy toast, and artificial tasting eggs, excited for day one of the 7-week long summer, but I am still not much more than a deer stunned in the headlights of an oncoming collision. I can see myself crashing already, and anticipate the impact. I cringe.
The day hauls on forever. Period one, two, then lunch. Period three, four, then dinner. Period 5, evening activity, snack, bed. The day is structured into a variety of slots and margins. Everything has a time and a place. The structure relaxes me, surprisingly. I don’t have to focus on what’s going to happen next, as there are no surprises... ever. Our day runs like clockwork, and not only because of the camp-issued schedule. Every morning we wake our four girls at 7:45. Erin has had, so far, about a 96% chance of wetting the bed. Vicky will ask how you slept approximately 4 times between wake up and breakfast. When you ask her how she slept, she will reply that she, a) slept like a rock, b) slept like a log, or c) slept like a baby. Vicky will ask what is on her schedule for the day between 6 and 8 times before lunch, then 3 to 4 times before dinner. She already knows the answer to every question she asks, and looks so intently into your eyes when she asks, that it can easily cause one to become uncomfortable. Vicky is unblinking, and concentrated at these times, but she still remains nothing but a child trapped in the body of a 28 year old. Vicky really looks about 45 years old, and it is quite apparent that her mother buys Vicky’s clothing from the same place as her own. Her hair is cut into a sleek brown helmet atop her head, with the odd streak of gray penetrating through. She reminds me of a frog, sometimes.

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It was surreal, being with campers in the outside world. It hadn’t occurred to me that, for these kids, life does exist outside of camp. There are real people, in a real world living real lives, and every single one of our campers would have to interact with at least some of them. At camp, we live in a bubble; in this bubble, everyone is understanding, and nice, and knows how to deal with all of our campers’ issues. The problem is that there is a life outside of the camp bubble. There is an actual test when they go home; hardly anyone in the world outside is even close to camp. Outside of camp, every one of our campers is the weird kid. Every camper is the “special kid” in class, the ones that other kids point at, the one who gets stares on the street, the one who gets beaten up; the one who has to live life as the odd one out. At camp, every camper is an odd one out. They don’t tease or poke fun, because they have all been on the receiving end of it. At the beach today, I heard the whispers, and I saw the stares. This is when I realized that when our kids go home, there will still be those people out there. We may have given them all of the poker chips we could during their stay, nevertheless there will still be those same people taking them away from them every single chance they get.
Today, I learned that we can’t fix the world. We just can’t. There are always going to be awful people out there. There is always going to be the class bully, there is always going to be the stares and whispers, and there will always be ignorant people.