> that summer camp feeling
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: that summer camp feeling.
Hello friend,
There’s a mosquito net around the bed in this apartment and it’s been doing a fine job, up until this week, when one morning I woke up with five bites on my legs. Perhaps it’s the familiar itching that's making me feel like I’m in summer camp again.
Summer camp, to me, was always an alternate reality. A temporary space to make new friends where, just as we were getting to know each other, I had to return to my real life and forget them all again. Perhaps this is why most of my summer camp memories are a bit fuzzy. A crush on some now-faceless kid at art camp. Giant water bottles at sports camp.
The one exception to these contained existences was piano camp. It’s the only camp where I’ve stayed in touch with my friends, some of whom I still haven’t seen since camp, six years ago.
A couple years ago, my partner and I roadtripped to Oberlin to meet one of my piano camp friends. It was a bit surreal meeting her again because it broke my internal summer camp rules.
It’s far from summer now, but I’m feeling the same summer camp feelings. Our Changhua cohort spends nearly every day together. It’s a lot of family dinners, calling in reservations for twelve. But where I feel summer camp the most is after dinner, walking in the empty streets at night, full.
In one of the orientation sessions this week, the presenter told us: “you don’t have to hang out with each other all the time.” There’s a desperate, heady feeling that comes from spending day after day together, the feeling that we’re young and can play right now, but that we’ll have to go back to our “real” adult lives when we return.
Is it too much to already be thinking of endings? It’s like that ABBA song: “Here’s to us, one more toast, and then we’ll pay the bill.” I don’t know who will be around me after I leave Taiwan. Who will I get to meet again in five years, like piano camp? It’s not that I’m afraid of endings, but I don’t want this to feel like a dream, like so many other summer camps.
How privileged it is to talk about this time like a dream. Of course I’m not at peace with the fact that I’m dropping in a school for only six months and leaving. I’m not under the pretense that I’ll contribute to the community in the big way. But I know that I’ll grow here and I want to savor that. Maybe it’s the desire to savor time that makes us, this cohort, want to stick together.
An essay I return to again and again during times of longing is Hanif Abdurraqib’s “On Summer Crushing,” especially this line:
I’ve had crushes on all my friends, and if they don’t have one back on me that’s fine because I’m still going to text them at unfortunate and odd hours of the day with some useless miracle that I couldn’t possibly keep to myself.
My partner teases me for these crushes, but I think that crushes are also a form of preservation. How else could I keep in touch with my piano camp friends, if not for random “how are you’s,” sent when I thought of them?
There’s a savoriness to being alone, too. Like on Saturday, a morning after a late night, when I went to the park to get 春聯 and nobody else was awake to come there yet. I wasn’t a part of a big crowd of 外國人. I was doing what I was scared of, passing as Taiwanese, feeling like an imposter, doing something I think I will never be able to do again. That’s summer camp, too, the sense that this is the only time I will get this moment.
If you would allow me to be selfish, I would tell you that the summer camp feeling is wanting to become more beautiful and less lonely. While I was buying makeup, there was a shopgirl who told me: “It’s been a long time since you’ve gotten your brows done, huh?” and tried to get me to buy a brows session. In my head, I thought: “Joke’s on you—I’ve never done them.”
There’s a self-consciousness from wanting an image change here, i.e. buying new clothes and trying makeup, and having shopgirls judge your eyebrows, but this is also part of that summer camp feeling. The sudden awareness, which is somehow so hard during times of routine, that you are growing.
Cheers,
Tiffany