the beach and camp.

"what filthy piles of sand our lives make, if we just sit beside the shore and never change."
anyone who has not listened to mike mains and the branches yet should give them a try. they're wonderful, and they're christians(not a christian band; a band where the people in it are christians but their music doesn't fall into the christian genre), and they're poor so you should buy them.
anyways. they wrote that line up there. i was listening to their album for the 14th time(i don't know the exact number but that's probably about right) and heard that, and i thought of how you can never walk on the same beach twice because the sand gets washed around and moved away.
i then started thinking of all the people not coming back to camp next year and a lightbulb went on.
camp is so much like the beach.
i call both the most beautiful place in the world.
they are both my favorite places to be.
both are full of God-metaphors.
and both are always changing.
neither has ever been exactly the same when i've revisited them.
but unlike the beach, i complain all the live long day about this fact about camp. sometimes i want to never go back because of this.
i tried to reason that this is stupid. if it doesn't bother me about the beach, it shouldn't matter at camp either.
but camp is not the beach, and people that i grow to love over two months are not bits of sand.
i've never worked in the same staff twice. no one ever will. it's just a part of camp. instead of getting easier every year, it gets harder. everyone leaves a piece of themselves at camp when they leave it. the ghosts build up a lot over four years.
i've worked with 107 different people. 91 were full-time staff, 14 worked a week or two, and 2 were there for a day and a half. 28 follow me around like laverne from scrubs in that one horrible episode after she dies.
this was the summer that i made more real friends than ever. (usually i make a ton of great just-in-the-summer friends, but it's their camp selves, not their real selves, that i'm friends with. and if we never work together again, we lose each other) even though i know they'll still be in my life a long time, most of them aren't coming back to camp. i've never had this much notice for how sad the beginning of a summer will be; i don't know if that'll make it easier or harder. we'll see.
i still want to go back, and God still wants me there, so this isn't keeping me away. it'll just be harder than ever right at first.