Page 7 of Fate Fiction

The home away from home I’ve had for my entire life.

The one place I could always return to. The location where no matter how far I’d been removed from it, I reverted back into the most authentic version of myself. The self that doesn’t have the worries and doubts that seem to settle in with adulthood, nor the self that fears the unknown.

It’s the place where I can be fully, truly me. In every sense.

My aunt and uncle’s wilderness camp tucked away in the north woods of Maine.

Aunt Sue couldn’t say no to her only niece in distress. I’d spent every conscious summer of mine there, I could practically run the place myself. Hell, I’d probably sleep on a cot under the stars if it meant that I didn’t have to spend another week in the apartment alone thinking about how I wasted my twenties in a terrible relationship.

Red Dock Lake Camps was beyond roads, beyond cell phone service, and in a way, beyond the twenty first century. It was the place where no matter what stage of life I’m in, or what I’m afraid of, I could go back and find myself again.

Year over year, my Aunt Sue’s band T-shirts would fade, her black hair dye would cover more grays, and my Uncle Randy’s bald spot would grow, but otherwise, the place never ever changed. Sue, the camp’s signature red dock, and Randy had seen me in every possible form for the twenty eight years I’d been alive.

I dealt in a world of absolutes, and at this pinnacle of emotional crisis I had two options. Go to my Aunt and Uncle’s place, or impulse book that Mexico flight and flee the country. My finger still hovered over the book trip button while I tapped my credit card in the other hand.

Red Dock Lake Camps was my only hope unless I felt like wrecking my credit and taking out a loan to afford anything else.

Two hours—interspersed with frenzied cleaning, more crying, and anxious pacing— passed by before I decided to call Sue and ask. I had to get everything out of my system before I could pick up the phone.

I loved Sue, but she was like if a tornado made a wish to become a human. I needed to clear up some mental space to handle the rambling conversation that would take up the front end of our call.

“I know you aren’t calling me to yap, what’s on your mind, lovebug?” Sue rasped after recounting a fight she had with a groundhog burrowing under her porch. We were twenty minutes into the call already.

I sucked in an anxious breath. “Can I please come up during opening week?” The words came out in a jumbled mess. Desperation clenched my voice as I sat at my kitchen table, laptop still open on a dozen different tabs with my proposed Mexico trip ready and waiting.

Sue was silent on the other end. She knew there was more to the story. Sue always knew.

“Nick and I broke up,” it was weird to say it out loud for the first time. “I really could use a getaway, and I know it’s never busy that first week. I’ll pay full price and even work while I’m there. I really, really can’t be in my apartment anymore.” I thought the tears had all but dried but my cheeks grew damp as I groveled.

“Oh, Danbam, I’m so sorry,” Sue cooed through the phone, her voice tinny from poor cell service. “Let me check some things and see if you can come. You’ll be okay, please don’t do anything spur of the moment just yet.”

She spoke to me in the same way she did when I was young and scraped a knee running around camp. Her voice was soft, slightly husky from a past life spent chain smoking at rural dive bars in the eighties.

We’d said our goodbyes, I begged a little more, thanked her for even trying, then wiped my cheeks and hung up the phone. It was silent now, even the traffic and birds outside seemed to stop. The life had been sucked out of the apartment.

Sue would get my firstborn child if she could let me stay for the week, but Cozumel stared me down from the laptop as I paced around my kitchen again. I tried to take her words to heart, Mexico could wait a little while longer.

Hardly an hour later, I got the text.

Sue

gud 2go luvbug, on us ;)

C u then

Her cryptogram-like text speak was another quirk of Sue, she was a relic of a different time with scarce internet access. She and Randy didn’t watch television, didn’t have kids, and only made the trek into town to restock.

They were the ideal people to forget a horrible ex with, and their camp was the ideal place to do it.

My heart leapt as I read and re-read the text. I would get my escape, and my bank account wouldn’t suffer the effects of my sudden slip into impulsivity.

Cinematics could now slip back in.

A coming of age tale! A trip that would transform my life!

Everything was laid out ahead of me, I could eat, pray, love myself into being happy again. I could emulate Reese Witherspoon in that one hiking movie without the near death experience.

I started up the shower to give myself one more deeply dramatic cry, and I savored it. I thanked my mother for the shower speaker she got me as a stocking stuffer for Christmas a few years back, despite how badly I’d wanted to discount it as the kind of gift one gives someone they hardly knew. My curated breakup playlist was able to trickle through the water droplets thanks to her half-assed generosity.