So long, summer camp
As the first round of eliminations sweeps through the league, I wrote a poem about how expectations shift each time a star reaches the playoffs.
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.
I shed a tear reading this
Dang!