When teenage boys go to sleepaway camps every summer

they arrive with big hearts and nervous apprehension—

do they throw their duffels to the ground

and go straight to the basketball court

or

do they pause

and have earnest conversations:

How was your year?

How is your mother?

What are you passionate about lately?

Each,

broken down later in life in cars with their wives on superhighway shoulders,

glorious desert vistas in their ice-caked windshields,

frozen stiff by the whiskey winds,

they are rocked,

frayed forever.