The Goodbye Girl

Last year, my summer at Appel Farm passed by so slowly I could count the hours. This year, it was a zip line I flew down in a delirious rush. Nine weeks may as well have been nine days. It felt as if I arrived at camp one day, pale-skinned and buzzing with anticipation, only to leave the next day with a tan and the weary look of an old woman who has been living in a bunk surrounded by 16-year olds for the last nine weeks.

How another summer has so quickly come and gone is beyond me. As I type this from the seat of a plane soaring over the dirty landscape of New Mexico, I feel slightly bemused by the thought that camp is over. Nine weeks of classes and counselling and telling the campers not to squirt ketchup straight into their mouths is over. It feels like it was just a figment of my imagination which, for one beautiful moment, became something tangible. Then it disappeared like all figments do, back into the abyss.  And I carry on forward.

It would be lovely to fool myself into believing I will be back at the farm next year, but I know it wouldn't be true. I have sucked the place dry of everything it had to offer me and I have offered it two very willing summers of my life in return. I've come to realise that I'm ready for new adventures, which means no more escaping back to the USA each June. As I drove away in the rain on Sunday, I turned around and took one last look at the place where this whole rollercoaster first started in 2010. I remember that day now like a bunch of images flashing from an old film roll– catching the yellow school bus from New York, pulling into the Appel Farm parking lot, the first time I stepped into the bunk, the first time I even spoke to the people whose arms I cried into when I left.

Had anyone told me this is how it would all turn out two years after first deciding to apply for a summer camp, I never would have believed them.  That I would have a great time, yes. But that I would be so in love with Elmer, New Jersey that I would return for another year? That I would find a crazy kind of salvation? That having to say goodbye to those friends is like no heartbreak I’ve ever known? I don’t think that hopeful yet naive version of myself would have believed that.

There was much that happened between leaving Appel Farm on Sunday and boarding my plane to San Diego this morning, but the only part of it that I can remember is crying. And when I wasn’t crying, I was blinking back tears through bloodshot eyes and sniffling like a crack addict. The last 24 hours has just been one big blur of ‘lasts’. I looked into my best friends’ faces for the last time and I cried into their collar bones as we held each other for the last time. And in the glow of the Philadelphia lights, I had to ignore the unspoken fear that maybe these are summer flings, just like any other. Maybe our love will suffer in the lonvegity. Maybe we will become lazy with writing emails or making dates to call each other despite the time difference. Maybe the overwhelming sense of friendship which consumes me now will be reduced just to photos and anecdotes shared at the family dinner table. As untrue as I know that will be, the thought of it makes me want to vomit.

But as my eyes well up all over again, I feel no relief in the unsatisfying consolation that my friendships with these beautiful people are not in fact ending. Being best friends but in different countries is not enough. iPhone apps and email and Skype don’t create the same memoires. Seeing someone’s face on a computer screen is not the same as walking to the coffee shop with them. A letter in the mail is not the same as a conversation in person. The friends I left in Australia would vouch for this, which makes me the constant in this equation. I am the foolish masochist who continues to knowingly put oceans between herself and the people she loves.

And I know that I should be grateful that we found each other at all – kindred spirits are not easily stumbled across. But I can’t be a member of the Pollyanna Club on this one. I am handing back my badge and just being plain old down in the dumps.  

Think I’ll go cry some more now.

Ciao for now. xo