Counting Up The Days (Camren)

After (Normal)

The new year started just as the old one had ended: surrounded by the same obnoxiously loud people with an aching void where my vital organs should have been.

In that moment I willed myself to kiss Lucia back with a passion the dormant butterflies in my stomach could not feel, I kissed her with a fervour my beating heart did not reciprocate. I tried to make this moment special to her because she well and truly deserve it, and that was the least I could do for her after everything she had done and would continue to do for me.

Just as my will started to ebb away her tongue extracted itself from my mouth and her lips detached themselves from mine. I had played my part well I thought, until she took her hand in mine and guided me blindly through the throng of people and down into the basement below.

I realise that the picture I'm depicting right now is the epitome of terrible. Me as the girl with a mind driven by the one thing it cannot have whilst remaining blatantly unresponsive to the beautifully minded person who had me in her arms blocking my fall. And yes in short this was very easily the case, but when she said she loved me and I said it back I truly meant it with my entire heart mind body and soul. She had saved me so many times and continued to rescue me out of my darkest corners every hour of every day. The flaw however was that, whilst I loved her madly wildly and passionately, I was not in love with her.

Sometimes prepositions make all the difference.

There were obviously the good days, the days where my sun kissed skin revelled in Lucia's touch, where we would spend hours just lying in each others arms talking our heads off like the day our relationship was reborn about the injustices on the legal system and what humanity was left to fight, only intervaled by heated debates over our favorite ice-cream topping or competing over who could make up the best imaginary friend.

There were days where my mind allowed Lucia to be an escape from Camila, just like Camila had been my escape from the greater world. And there were moments that I truly believed I could make this wonderfully unique woman my home.

But how could she be my home, or I be hers, if I was destined to be an eternal nomad?

And it was moments like this, just like what happened on New Years Eve, that make those wishful fantasy thoughts into just that, a fantasy.

Day two of the new year, day fourteen of my own personal count up and suddenly I found myself surrounded by not only friends but also family once more. My parents and Chris and Taylor had all come up to beautiful California to spend a normal family vacation resting normally and doing normal snow sports surrounded by normal people. Or at least that was the idea.

After so many years I'm not completely sure what the definition of a 'normal' family getaway is anymore, but it sure doesn't sound like being surrounded by bodyguards whenever we're outside the resort, or having paparazzi craning over the fences until they are threatened away, or being surrounded by a group of artists I look up to and with who I feel close enough to to be able to call my friends or even staying in the most expensive accommodation possible and having it all paid for me as long as I do some positive advertisement. I guess one could say the pros outweigh the cons, but is it normal for me to want the actual Normal for once?

So despite all the obstacles we went snowboarding anyways, falling and getting back up, falling and getting back up, falling and getting back up until you finally made it down the slope once without causing searing pain to shoot all the way up your spine... and then you would fall once more and the ordeal would start all over again. I shouldn't complain though, in a way the experience was cathartic. Being surrounded by throngs of people forced me to keep going despite every bone in my body pleading with me to stop, and the icy air kept me as focused and as concentrated as possible. In a way it was my body getting the therapy my mind was withering without.

Day seventeen and it was Taylor's birthday. Now I had another reason to mourn about the past: it hit me like a ton of bricks that my little sister was growing up fast and I was barely there to witness it. You know you've been away for too long when you come back and can physically see a difference in the person standing before you. Dinah is all too aware of the amount of time that she spends away from siblings who at a point did not even recognise her, but in this moment I acutely understood too. Taylor might always recognise me, but she's not always the girl that I would describe to anyone that might ask.

Birthdays are supposed to be a time to celebrate being a year older and yet in reality not feeling any more than a day older than yesterday, but on that day when my younger sister turned sixteen- the same age that I was when my life ceased to be everything that it had been before- the difference in her was as starkly visible as it would have been if she had just turned 30.

I realised when I woke up surrounded by foreign snow and the familiar celebration song that it was not only myself that I had missed for the last four and a half years, it was also all the people that made up my identity. Normal had changed for good and we still are all adjusting to the new set of rules that this Normal brings with it, but in that moment, surrounded by song and smiles and presents and love, I realised that there was still a bit of the old more simple Normal left inside of us.

All I remember from the rest of the day was love, not the lack of it which had made me see red for so long up to that point. On the contrary, I remember the bountiful amount of love that sheltered us all like a protective halo throughout that winter day. The love helped me loosen my bones a bit, and I felt my heart plead for music once more. So that's what I did; I sat down and sang for my family for the first time since Camila had left, and the wonder that radiated off everyone's faces didn't even make the moment ache. I sang for pleasure, not for work, and it was liberating.

Everyone always says that you should do what you love and success will follow. That's what I was lucky enough to do, but what if you stop loving it as much as you used to? Let me explain. At the end of the day a job is a job regardless of what that job is. Its fundamental entity is the same: work your ass off doing whatever it is you're doing and hopefully you'll get the deserved amount of money in return. When what you love turns into a method of exploitment, when the ultimate decision is down to how much money and exposure you will gain from something and not the experiential value, when you are used as a pawn in a much larger game that they claim I won't understand, when all of this happens then you really don't feel like you're doing what you love any more.

What I love is finding a beautiful way of expressing myself without being restricted by the regimented rules of language. What I love is being able to make other people feel just as much as I do with only my voice. What I love is using the gift of inspiration and empowerment and knowledge and giving bits of it to as many people as possible with just a song. What I love is art for art's sake.

And I'm sorry to burst your bubble but this is far from what any job is in this day and age. Sure maybe I will be able to do what I love purely because I love it occasionally, but only if it's within the strict boundaries the men in suits apply and is in accordance with the constitution length contracts I unknowingly signed in blood sweat and tears. So no, a job is a job is a job and nothing else.

So for once I solely enjoyed the moment for the experiential gain instead of the forced coldness that is the exchange value. I sang for love and with only love, and for me what came out was as good as anything I had ever produced behind the thick glass wall of a recording booth.