Esme was walking through the woods. The sky was a dark grey, and she heard the rumble of thunder, but she did not slow down or turn back. She had to see for herself. The sky darkened still, and the clouds rolled like water boiling in a pot. Esme quickened her pace. She had been walking for hours. It was sunny earlier that day, but the clouds came in the minute she set foot on the trail.
The trees cleared, and Esme gasped. She stepped into the clearing and gazed at the wreckage. The house where she had spent many summers in. Wrecked. Destroyed. Eroded. Windows were cracked in some places and shattered in others. Cobwebs coated the front porch, and the roof was partly caved in. Several shingles littered the ground, and the wood was rotting. Esme knelt down and touched one of the mossy stepping stones that led to the house. It was rough, and the moss was damp. She stood up and walked in a little further.
She saw the lake where she learned to swim. It was a murky brown, and cattails grew around the edges. Next to it was a broken-down diving board. It was coated in dirt, and what once was white was now ivory. A chunk of the diving board was floating in the dirty water. Esme went a little further. There was a giant tree, on which a rotting tree house perched precariously. Several planks of wood had fallen on the ground, and the tree house itself was wrecked. It was like a miniature version of the larger house. As she stared sadly at the debris, she felt a raindrop fall on her head. she looked up, and another one fell on her cheek. In the span of a few seconds, it was pouring. As the water washed down on her head, she looked around. She could barely see three feet around her. Her shirt was drenched, but before she left, she sang a quiet song.
"There was a place in Maine, not that long ago, where we would hide away, for several months or so. Tucked beneath the pines, and under summer skies, a bunch of twenty-somethings running barefoot every night. And some of us were new, and some had been for years, a few of us found love, and all of us had fears, but every single night, we'd gather by the fire and sing away the night. And oh, when the fire burns out and the embers all die, we still have all our stories, like stars in the sky, and we will always remember how we lit up the night, oh, summers by the lake, like a million twinkling lights..."
As she walked back down the trail, she had one thought shining through all the other thoughts in her head:
Camp Moonlight was no more.