So long, summer camp

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That first year, every day feels like summer camp
bare feet and friendship bracelets,
etching your name into a wooden bunk
in a cabin filled with your closest friends.
You've never had this much fun in your life,
fighting dragons under moonlit skies,
on open fields with singing grasshoppers,
imagining dynasties until the sun comes up.
You don't cry when you sprain your ankle
or even when the bus pulls up the old dirt road
a few weeks early
ready to collect you and your friends.
You're just happy that you've made it here,
to this place you spent a lifetime dreaming of.
You'll spend all year dreaming of being back.
You don't know yet
that it will never be like this again.
That next time you trip and fall
there will be no one waiting around the corner
with a band-aid and a gentle smile.
That the older you get
the more afraid of the dark you'll become
as the night sky seems to swallow
the friends who became family,
reducing them to names you trace
in sleepless nights on wooden bunks.
Each time the bus creaks up the road too soon,
dread creeps in.
Will they take your friends?
Will they take you?
You didn't know
your youth was your armor
until it slipped from your shoulders
each fall hurting more than the last.
But nothing hurt more
than watching fire tear through the fields
you once frolicked in,
miles of unfinished dreams
surrendering to the flames.
This time, the bus doesn't take you home.
Instead it drops you in a different city
with a different set of names to learn.
Each time you step onto new land,
unproven,
you feel alone
but you know that you aren't.
You carry the weight of every past version of you,
every letter carved on borrowed homes
repurposed into a weapon
by the people who once chanted it like a prayer.
The only thing that is all yours,
that they cannot twist or take,
is the feeling of each moment
burned into your memory like a bittersweet tattoo.
The times you ran fearlessly into battle
guided by nothing but your beating heart.
How the same place could make you feel invincible
and leave you hollow.
The only version of you
who has lived through it all
is the one who cared more about the joy of possibility
than the fear of failure.
For them, you will fight
until there is nothing left to give,
until the bus comes to collect you
one final time.