Written: at my weekend getaway in the woods
Powered by: Haribo Goldbears
Inspired by: Wild + Free playlist on Spotify
It was the kind of place where people posted signs outside of their RVs, maybe with their last names on them, or something like “Camp Hakuna Matata”, decorated with painted drawings of a boat out on a lake or a long-legged frog asleep in her hammock. Kids drove too fast in rented golf carts, clinging to the collar of their dogs desperate to jump free, and women rode in the back of pick-up trucks with their legs dangling from the bed, sun-spotted and wrinkled.
The group of them were piled around the red picnic table, koozies soaked with condensation and two trash bags tied to the handles of the car doors, one for trash and the other for recycling. They had planned to spend the day hiking, maybe swimming in the lake. But once they got the site set up, a beer was instantly cracked and now the sun was beginning to set. They were each boozy-mouthed and crispy-skinned, and the dog had long ago retired to the cool gravel beneath the truck bed.
“Anyone want to get the fire going?” one of them asks, “We can roast s’mores.”
“Fucking, s’mores,” says another, but the faded tone of her voice makes it unclear if she’s exhilarated or agitated by the thought, and no one stands from the table to light the pile of wood in the pit.
Across the table and squished uncomfortably between two sweating bodies, she can’t get last night out of her head. No amount of alcohol can seem to keep her mind from the memory of their conversation, how his face had fallen when she told him about the offer, the raise and the move. It happened on the floor of their bedroom, which she was unable to think of as their bedroom because it had once been his parent’s bedroom. Surrounded by sleeping bags and hiking boots, he shook his head at her. “But aren’t you happy here?” he asked.
“I don’t even know what happiness is,” she told him back.
She felt justified in her response, her feeling that living in this same place since kindergarten, coming to this campground with their friends every summer since college, she had missed out on part of her opportunity to learn what true happiness should feel like. That the others who had not stayed had somehow been afforded more of life than she had been given, more chances to become someone different. And she wanted that option, to be someone different.
The clacking sound of a beer bottle connecting with the picnic table made her jump. “Skinny dipping,” one of them announced, and she felt his hand squeeze her knee excitedly as they all squealed and screamed in response, in the drunken giddiness of the moment.
But then the breeze blew enough to cool their faces and peel their hair from the sweat on the back of their necks. One of them tossed around another couple of cans and they stayed, crowded around the table, the meat of their thighs sticking to each other, not even noticing the mosquito bites.