My Trip to Camp

I’m on a muddy, yellow bus coming back from camp. I'm twelve and so are you. Prior to leaving for camp, I had imagined it would be just me and three, maybe four, other boys that I hadn't met yet, running around all summer, getting ourselves into trouble. Playing games and just enjoying our summer. You know, typical boy stuff. Ultimately it ended up being me and this one girl. That's you. As long as we are still on the bus its like we are still at camp. Once we reach the pickup point where our parents would be waiting for us camp will be over.

We are still wearing our purple camp T-shirts. The bus aroma still resembles wilderness. We still smell like pine. It’s been one amazing weekend with you. The feeling I have right now are confusing, ones that I’ve never previously experienced. I like you and you like me and I more than like you, but I am not sure if you do or don't “more than like me.” You have never said, so I kept the thought to myself and haven't been saying anything about it all summer long. I am pleased with enjoying the microscopic miracle of a girl choosing to talk to me and choosing to do so again the next day and so on and so on. A girl who is intelligent and comical that wants to hang out with me. A girl who, if I say something dumb to make her laugh, is willing to say something two sometimes even three times as dumb to make me laugh. A girl who isn’t completely normal, capable of being a little weird, yet also be wise sometimes in a way I couldn’t fathom being. A girl who enjoys reading books that haven’t been assigned to her, whose curly blonde hair frequently has a line running through it from the tie she uses to hold it up while it is still wet. How lucky could I be?

Back in the real world that the camp allows...

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...hing. I'm not going to say that what I learned is true or not. I am just expressing what I learned. I told you something. It was solely for you and you wasted no time telling everyone. This led me to the realization that I should just cut out the “middle man” because everyone will find out anyways. People can't turn around and tell everybody, because everybody already knows, I told them. Unfortunately this means that there isn't a place in my life for you or somebody like you. Is it sad? Of course. But this is a sadness that I chose. It’s easier to cope with loneliness than betrayal. Sometimes I truly wish that I could say that this was a story about how I got on the bus a boy and got off a man more masculine, hardened, and mature. But that's not the truth. The truth is that I got on that yellow four-wheeled machine a boy. And I never got off of it. I still haven't.