I was twenty-three when they sent me home. Three summers of devotion, three years of sunburns and scraped knees, of singing around the fire and waking up before dawn to make sure my campers were safe, fed, and cared for. I had built my world around the summer camp where I spent every summer since I was a child. Over the years, I believed that these people were my family, and that camp was my home. But one day, they pulled me aside, told me to pack my things, and that was it.

I was let go.

They didn’t say why. Not in any way that mattered. Something about needing to make changes, about decisions that had to be made. I nodded, trying not to let my hands shake as I stuffed my clothes into my duffel bag. I had walked in as one of them, but I left as an outsider, the line between belonging, and banishment had been drawn in the dust of the camp road. I told myself that this was temporary, and one day, I’d find my way back.

I returned for reunions, for visiting days, and for any excuse I could find, only to pretend that nothing had changed. I wanted so badly to believe that I still mattered, that I hadn’t been erased. I smiled at familiar faces, laughed at inside jokes that no longer included me, and slept in the same cabins that were once a part of who I was, but now carried an unfamiliar weight. I was an unwelcome guest in a place I used to call my home.

They tolerated me, but they did not welcome me. I felt it in the way conversations trailed off when I approached, in the polite but distant smiles, in the empty spaces where I used to fit. They had thrown me away. They had removed my pictures from the camp photo albums, tore out all my handwritten contributions to the camp diaries, and rewrote the story of my favorite place without me in it. But despite all this, I still couldn’t let go.

I kept showing up, kept trying to earn back something that maybe I had never truly had. I was chasing a version of the past that didn’t exist anymore, clinging to a place that had already let me go.

I still wonder why they did it. Did they think I wouldn’t notice? That I wouldn’t feel the shift, the slow, quiet rejection that seeped into every interaction? Did they ever miss me the way I missed them? Did they ever wonder if I was okay?

Or, had I been nothing more than a chapter they had finished reading, closed the book on, and placed back on the shelf, forgotten? Will they ever show me the love that nobody else ever has? Or will I always be the girl who tried too hard to belong somewhere that never truly wanted her?

March 4, 2025