Please Do Forget to Write
I’ve had such a good time meeting you this summer! I’m really going to miss you, and Camp Wamkeag, and all our friends, and all those sunset canoe rides around the island. Hanging out on the picnic tables outside our cabins at night, swatting flies off our bodies, sweltering in the heat in the afternoon, and stealing kisses behind the art shed after making tie-dyed t-shirts–this has all been so transformative, such a total blast.
This place fills me with such warmth. It’s really hard to think about going home to my stupid small town, where people think I’m weird and don’t pay much attention to me. It has meant so much, to have this romance this summer, and to at last finally kiss a girl. I didn’t think I’d have to wait until I was thirteen to cross that milestone, but now that I have, I can’t imagine I’ll ever forget you.
I like you a lot, Lisbeth. I will miss you terribly.
Just please don’t write.
Basically, I want us to be like Rose and Jack in that movie Titanic–together for a few days, and then you stay on your door floating in the water, and I turn into a popsicle. All great summer camp romances are like that movie–short, sweet, and without time enough to discover any flaws. If they’d both made it to the States, things probably wouldn’t have worked out.
What are we going to do? Write back and forth about the asparagus we had for dinner and how much we hate our stepfathers? How stupid geometry class is? Sorry, but long-winded exposition does not make the best reading material.
And you know as well as I do that there’s a vague but definite sense of arbitrariness to our affections, sweet as they are. We may be young, but we’re not stupid. We chose each other because we were both available and because the risk was so low, given that camp lasts only a week, and the big final dance in the main lodge that caps it off doesn’t even require fancy dress!
Oh, those slow dances! Getting a bit misty here. We really connected. And we didn’t have to say anything.
But seriously, let’s not ever move that far past the surface. We’re young. We’re cute. We both like each other for liking each other. Relationships rarely come and go with such a lack of guilt and heartbreak. Later, there won’t be summer camp to go to, and we’ll have to give reasons for not wanting to see each other, or we’ll have to work faster and with more obvious callousness during some one-night layover somewhere.
This is a special time of our lives.
So please do forget to write, and let this time we had together remain pure, shallow, short, and perfect.
Love always (unless you ask for more of it),
Pete