Pain, Lust and Life
It was the summer between sixth and seventh grade. I
was at "Heart's Bend," a summer camp in Newfane, Vermont. Heart's Bend was not
like other summer camps that I had been to, and I doubt that there is any other like it. I
went to this summer camp for four years. There is something about those four summers that
has affected my personality in a significant way. I can not be sure what it was exactly
that had such an effect on me, but after Heart's Bend I was never the same again, nor did
I wish to be.
I can not stop them; no matter what I do, the words keep
on going through my mind. I am sitting here in English class trying to keep my mind on
what Mr. Frevola is saying. But I can not; it is not that he is boring but that he words
of her song keep on scrolling across the insides of my eye lids as I sink deeper
into that well known depression due to the loss of a world long lost but greatly loved.
"The seasons they go 'round and 'round, the painted
ponies go up and down, captured on a carousel of time." Harriet sang with a smile on
her face. We were all sitting around the campfire up by the leantoos; every one else was
singing and smiling, except me. I was sitting there watching them have a good time, but my
mind was elsewhere. I was wandering through a fantasy world that I had visited so many
times before, but had never been able to find in reality. Harriet was sitting just twenty
feet from me singing her song, totally unaware that in my mind I had undressed her and was
gently feeling the soft skin of her freckled body.
As I sat there I felt my penis growing into its erect
state and I felt that all too familiar feeling of rage, anger and hurt that came over me
with this erection. I slowly got up trying to hide the bulge in my shorts, which I felt
quite sure was visible to everyone there and walked towards the woods. On reaching the
edge of the dense forest I started to run. I was running from all those people I had left
behind; it was their world, I did not want to be a part of it any more.
"I hate this camp. I hate Lindsey. I hate Kim. I
hate Lorren. I hate Harriet. I am going to run away from all of them. Faster they are
after me!. They are going to hunt me down and make me... No! I will not let them. Faster!
Faster! Faster!" I was thinking to myself as I ran. The more I ran, the more paranoid
I became and the faster I would run.
Through this running I was trying to beat any evil out of
my body. I thought that if I felt pain I would be a better person in the end. As I ran
through the forest the pricker bushes would claw at my ankles making them bleed. Twigs and
sometimes whole branches would snap into my face causing large welts to appear.
Eventually I would calm down and sometimes I just started
to cry, not because of the extreme pain that I was in, but because I pitied myself so
much. When I finally came to my senses, I realized that I was about two miles from the
camp. I would start on my way back. As I walked, I thought about what had happened and why
it had happened. I promised myself that it would not happen again. But I knew that it
would.
It was on one of these runs from reality that I found the
"Old Barn." At first I was not sure what it was. I was running up "the back
pasture" and the barn slowly started to show itself over the top of the hill. It
looked so morbid. What a word, morbid; it is the way of so many things in life...
"I will meet you up by the old barn after lunch
dishes. Ok?" I said to Lindsey. She just nodded her head and started to walk away
towards the main house.
"Hi!" I said panting as I lay down on the old
mattress next to Lindsey. I was completely out of breath after hiking up the back pasture
which led to the now dilapidated "old barn."
"What took you so long?" Lindsey asked me with
that funny look which she often wore when she had something on her mind.
"I was in the barn grooming the horses and I lost
track of time. How long have you been up here?"
"Oh, not too long. So what do you want to do?"
"We could continue looking through those boxes over
there. Or we could climb up to the third tier like the other day and pick up where we left
off." In this old barn were many relics of a life long past, and long forgotten.
During our many hours of exploration in this barn, we had come across boxes filled with
letters and other personal items collected over a lifetime by a person whom we assumed was
no longer with us on this planet. We had spent many happy hours reading over these letters
of a person we did not know, but felt that we came to know very well. There were also many
other things in this barn; old pinball machines, old cameras, and many old antique
furnishings.
When Lindsey and I went up to this old barn we did many
things; however, our time was usually consumed doing one of three things, we either looked
through the above mentioned boxes, played with the old games we found in the barn or made
out. Now we come to one of the main reasons that we went up to the barn. It was the
perfect place for us to go and make out or just to be by ourselves. We loved to go up
there, take off all of our cloths and just lie on one of the old mattresses. It was so
free, so natural, we were so young.
"Last one up is the first to strip!" Lindsey
screamed tauntingly at me as she ran towards the ladders that led up to the second and
third level.
"Ha! Ha! You wish!" I replied in an equally
taunting tone of voice as I raced up the ladder after her.
"You will never catch me."
"Just you watch me!" I said as I grabbed onto
her shoe, "I got you now!"
We were now even on the ladder and neither one of us
could move, so we called a truce and climbed up to the third level. Once up there we
quickly started a game of spin the bottle. Soon we were both nude, lying there, looking
out, down onto the green pasture with the cows and horses grazing so peacefully. The
animals below seemed to be in another world, and in a way they were. Here we were, this
girl and I, laying here in our nakedness, in this barn, a forbidden place; we felt so much
power going through us. We started to make out, and at first it was so scary; what if some
one were to find us here like this? We knew what they would do to us, but knowing the
trouble we could get into only made us want more of this feeling... this feeling of power
and lust and most of all, at least for me, of Godliness.
I have suffered from this experience and the many others
like it that I had at Heart's Bend. It is not that these were bad experiences, but rather
they were so good that everything else suffers in comparison. I know that it is true that
one can have too much of a good thing.
