Crazy

To: condorboy

Subject: dust

Dear Connor,

Forgive me for my absence and my silence and for not spending this time congratulating you on your potential sex life, but I’m in one of my lonely moods again. I asked Trevor when he’s going to come up to Seattle next, and he accused me of being needy. Is it needy for a girl to want to see her man more than once a month? Is it needy for a girl who lives in Seattle to get sad sometimes that her lover lives in Portland? “Lover” is such a bizarre word, but it’s sadly more appropriate than “boyfriend” in this case. Have I told you that Trevor refuses to call me his girlfriend? His definition of whatever we are is simply that we’re “hanging out.” For nine months, we’ve been “hanging out.” I try not to think about the millions of groupies who are no doubt throwing themselves at him wherever he goes. I try to be evolved and not jealous and all that. But it’s hard. It’s impossibly hard. Is it too much to ask for some kind of definition?

Remember how at camp there was that unspoken divide between the cabin counselors and everyone else? No one ever talked about it, but everyone knew it was there. We didn’t have to wear their stupid preppy-rich-kid uniform and we got to hang out with the people who actually had interesting stuff to say. We were all just a bunch of misfits doing our own thing, with no need for any centralized government. But the counselors took it all so seriously, all their official and unofficial hierarchies, like they brought their titles of “school president” and “debate club captain” with them to the middle of the forest. And we just watched their little soap opera, how they worked so hard to make sure everyone knew their place. Did you ever notice that certain camp songs were only ever led by certain counselors? Like everyone knew those were their songs and no one else was allowed to sing them.

But we had more fun than them, I’m sure of it. I don’t know how many times I came across a huddle of lower-tier counselor girls crying by the bathrooms after the campers all went to sleep, weeping about how all the boys liked Annie, and how Annie’s cabin got all the good time slots at activities. For your information, I have declared war on all Annies of the world. Did you ever talk to her? Her cabin came into the Craft Shack once on your day off, and she talked my ear off for an hour about how her dad wanted her to go to Yale, and her grandma wanted her to go to Stanford, and she wanted to go to Brown, and oh my god, what a fucking tragedy! She certainly wasn’t charming, and she wasn’t even that pretty, but she felt entitled to have someone listen to her, even if it was just the crazy Craft Shack girl in the fishnets and flannel shirt. She was just one of those girls who grew up with everyone telling her how pretty and perfect she was, so she ended up believing it, so everyone else believed it too. Oh, Annie, how I despise you and your inflated self-esteem!

Anyway, where I was going with this was that I was thinking about camp and how fun it was, and how I’m convinced we had way more fun than any of those boring douchebags. Were they friends with the townies who knew all the cool places to go? No. Did Roger the Repair Man tell them where the secret beach was? No. If he did, those three idiot counselors from Bellevue could have gone there to smoke pot instead of behind the lodge, and then they wouldn’t have gotten caught and kicked out. Did Hippie Erin from the farm share her prized blueberries with them? No. Did Townie Dane take them on a midnight hike and show them which slugs make your tongue numb when you lick them? No. Not everyone is worthy of that kind of information.

My theory is that heaven is different for everyone. It’s based on your best memories, and you just get to relive them over and over again for eternity. Same with hell, except the opposite. Like, my version of hell would be the time I found my brother OD’ed in his bedroom when I was eleven, then had to spend the next three days in the hospital listening to my parents fight about whose fault it was that he turned out that way. Except in hell, my sister wouldn’t be there to hold my hand and tell me it’s going to be okay. It would just be me and my parents and all the sad people in the waiting room, and no one would be telling me anything.

But heaven for me would be summer camp. God, I’m so childish. You’d think I’d pick someplace exotic like Venice or a tropical beach in Belize, but I’ve never been to either of those places, and the truth is I don’t have a lot of truly happy memories. Think about it—camp really is perfect. No parents, no homework, they feed us pretty decent food, and we get to make art and hang around kids all day. But only for an hour or so at a time, because just as they start to get annoying their counselor takes them away, and we’re left to go hiking and lick slugs or whatever we feel like. We get to breathe the sea and can see all the stars at night and no one is really around to tell us what to do. Do you realize it’s never going to be like that again? Never in our lives are we going to be that free. Pretty soon we’re going to have to take care of everything ourselves, we’ll have to get a crappy job to pay for a crappy apartment, and we’ll spend the bulk of our days doing something we hate.

If you wanted to run away and live in the forest, it would not be that hard to convince me to come with you. I got pretty good at the bow and arrow this summer, so I could do all the hunting.

Landlocked,
Isabel