Summer Camp Shenanigans, Part 6: In Which Glitter Girl Cries a Lot and Tries To Remember Everything Else That Happened That Day

Hello lovelies!

Welcome to Part 6 (finally) of Summer Camp Shenanigans! When we last left off, it was Thursday and good things had happened.

Now time for Friday.

So on Friday morning, I managed to swim (decided Thursday morning was too sucky to go through again) and then we went canoeing. My canoe team argued a lot, but we went pretty fast, although one of the counselors had to pull our canoe onto the beach at the end because we kind of sucked at steering. So good times with water sports.

And also lunch, which was good.

And then there was turtle time, and that's when stuff went down.

Before I go any further, here's some background: every session, we have a closing campfire. Basically, we all go down to the campfire and we sing rather sad camp songs that we don't sing any other time, and we say nice things about our units and the camp director makes nice speeches and we do a bunch of rather odd end-of-camp rituals and you'd think it would be fun and exciting but it's actually really sad for quite a few of us. Myself included.

So anyway, my unit leader was teaching us the song we were going to sing. It was a rather sad and mildly strange song called "One Tin Soldier" (Google it if you don't know what it is, it's actually pretty good). I got it pretty quickly, but then all of a sudden, I realized that this was the last night. This was my last taste of camp for another year. And I felt pretty rubbish about that.

And what does Glitter Girl do when she feels things?

That's right; she cries.

So I started crying, and then Raina realized I was crying, and we ended up hugging in the middle of the room and I felt kind of sucky and stuff. I managed to recompose myself afterward, and then we went to riding.

And I cried again.

Whoop-dee-do.

We rode, and we went on another trail ride (very unusual, but good) and I thought on horseback, and figured out that I'm generally the most clear-headed when I'm not in the ring; things seem smaller, less difficult, on the trail. And then we took our unit picture, which was also good.

Then came candlelight dinner.

More background: every session, on the last night of camp, all the camp gets fancied up (well, all the counselors do, and some of the campers, but most of them didn't bring any nice clothes so there's usually a bunch of us in t-shirts) and we eat various foods and sing a lot of noisy camp songs. And then, all dressed up and fancy, we go down to the closing campfire.

So candlelight dinner was a good time. The closing campfire was sad.

We got down there, and I might've lasted, like, five minutes before I started crying (again). We sang our song, and then we did that thing where we all say nice things, and the topic of this year was "Who do you want to be like when you grow up?"

I said it was my counselors, because they'd been so patient with me throughout my mess.

And then Fiona got up.

Fiona said that she wanted to be like me, because I was open and honest about whatever I was feeling.

I have never been so flattered in all my life.

After the campfire and the weird camp rituals, we went back up to the unit, and I must've thanked every single counselor there for putting up with all of my drama, and they said it really was no big deal, and I felt kind of better about it but kind of not.

And then we all went to bed again, and that was the end of Friday.