Counting Up The Days (Camren)

After (Another Ending)

Day twenty three and it seemed to move from one birthday to the next, and the next one just so happened to be Lucia's. Family had been packed off once more because school and work had started for those who were lucky enough to follow the normal path of life. And here I was, left on my own yellow brick road leading me to somewhere different and terrifyingly new, all I wanted to do was for it to take me back home again- and to myself.

But no, I was spending my days in the same climate that my skin had been repulsed by and my heart had been drawn to for the past couple of weeks: Snowy Tahoe. It was now also the home to my girlfriend's 21st birthday. The big one. The one where you're finally of age. The one where you can legally drink even though you've been doing so for the past 8 years already, and the rest of the world has let you for 3 as well. The one where you don't remember anything about what happened, the one where you could be 5 or 55 just as much as 21 for all you remember about yourself with so much alcohol flowing through your bloodstream.

And remembering nothing is exactly what happened. For the second time in the space of two weeks my body became more alcohol than blood, and the insides of my lungs turned to a sickly shade of green. I remember fire, although from birthday candles, a heath or a lighter I am not sure. I remember a tongue, I wish I could tell you with certainty that it was Lucia's. I remember cold, freezing cold snow on a bare back. I remember heat, melting through my layers of clothing as easy as if the fabric was ice itself. A lyric from a song here, the shape of a glass filled to the brim there is all any of us can remember from that night and the day after.

Before I hated not knowing what had happened to me, for rendering my control to drugs (even if I kept doing so anyways) made me feel like I had given myself up for everyone else to have. But now I reveled in the ignorance. I hate the phrase but ignorance had finally become bliss.

What I gave Lucia as a birthday gift was simple: I got her a camera and a pendant to go with it. The camera was not of the latest and priciest style, but the one that had been in all the techno stores when we had gotten to know each other for the first time those many moons before. It was so that she could become the artist she is not just in front of the camera with her body, but behind it as well with her creative mind.

The pendant was on a rose gold chain, it was shaped like a heart. I carefully placed it around her neck, sweeping her hair to the side in the process, and catching a whiff of apprehension radiating off of her as strong as the droplets Chanel's Chance clinging to the skin of her neck. That was my first sign.

But it was her birthday so I didn't notice, or I made a conscious decision not to notice. It was her birthday and I had given her a pendant where, in the words of Ed Sheeran himself, the heart fell where her chest is. On the back I had inscribed his own words "you just need to breathe to feel my heart against yours now".

She liked it, but she wasn't stupid, she knew Camila's tumblr and she knew how much that song meant to the other girl. I swear I hadn't done it to hurt her, far from it, I believed that by giving her something that seemed to have long belonged to Camila then she would have realised that what was once, for me, the brown eyed girl's was now only hers. I don't blame her for seeing it as a gift to the wrong lover though, even I wasn't blind to the fact that I was giving her a stone heart because she would never be able to have my own real one.

At least she genuinely did love the camera.

Now all that was left was to enjoy the last few days of relative peace and freedom, before returning to the environment that I had been dreading being a part of again from the day I stepped off of that stage for the last time last year. And so, like all good things, the last days were ruined by the future and what was still to be written.

I can, with all legitimacy, blame Lucia. She was the one who mentioned taking a 'hiatus', making it sound like we were in a band rather than in a relationship which was probably the whole point she was trying to make after all. I can look back at it now and smile, because yes it was the right thing to do, but at the time it was betrayal in its purest form. At the time, it seemed like only a second ago that Camila had let go of me as good as leaving me for dead, and now the person who had managed to pick up some of the pieces was just scattering them back on the floor once more.

I had resented her sometimes, my heart was repelled from her touch during the moments that it felt like Camila owned my skin and was my body. But I also loved her, I loved her for loving me at my worst, I love her still for patiently trying to glue irreparable pieces of my soul back together. I could not be fixed, but she was a distraction and she had become my drug- even if it was only a drug to numb the pain, not to cause ecstasy.

Day twenty five, two days after her birthday, and I was lying down with my head in her lap and she was stroking my hair. We had taken to doing this quite regularly, it was its own form of mental well-being with its addictive repetitiveness, plus it was a kind of contact that I would relish in rather than feel repulsed from. My heart was beating steadily and my blood was idly flowing. And then the bomb hit.

"I've been thinking a lot recently, about us," she said with a hint of trepidation in her voice. My heart stopped and my blood flow froze. "And I've come to the conclusion that I don't think I can do this for much longer."

"Do what?" I tried to say, but the words wouldn't formulate past the growing pit in my stomach and I knew the answer anyway.

"I'm not saying we should break up. Yet. But I do think we should take a break, a kind of hiatus." Her hand had stopped moving through my hair, and I convinced myself it was just that that had caused my brain to freeze. "I love you, and I know you love me, but I don't know if our loves are the same or if they're even compatible with what we're doing right now. I feel like shit about the fact that I'm basically doing what I told you I would never do to you that first time below the stars, but there's a second person in this relationship too and it's not fair on her either. She's tried her fucking hardest to be the best she can be for you, she's cradled the pieces of glass that are your heart but to be honest all she's got to show from it is blisters and scars and bleeding and a heart of her own that has been neglected in the process."

Her fingers were somewhere else, they weren't massaging my head or caressing my hair. Where the fuck had her fingers gone?

"I'm really sorry that I'm doing this to you right now when she left you for good less than a month ago," she continued to ramble on but all I could think about was the absence of her fingers against my skin. "But I'm not saying it's over for good, I just feel like I need to take a breath away from you just for a bit. Soon you'll be back to work and I will feel even more powerless watching you suffer daily on the other side of the country. Let's just take a break, let's just find our own footing a bit and then in say a month we'll meet again and maybe we'll be new people. Maybe just maybe we'll be new pieces of the puzzle that is the world, two puzzle pieces that actually make sense together, not this fucking tornado of a disaster that we've got going on right now. What do you think? Even you must see that this isn't working right now, I'm probably doing you more harm than good anyways. You need a bandage, not just the measly plaster that is the only thing I can only offer you right now." I didn't reply, her fingers were not combing through my hair.

"Please say something Lauren, please?"

When I opened my mouth I did not recognise the voice that came out. "Your fingers, where are they? They're not touching my hair anymore, put them back."

In that moment I was a child, and so was I when I felt the soft pads of her fingers touch my hair once more. Immediately I felt streams of tears pour out of my eyes, down onto my cheeks and drip onto the bed's material, staining the fabric with salt drops and another box of memories that would now have to be labelled 'past'.

Heey I'm sorry for this mess of a chapter but I wanted to keep up my once a week update rhythm so here I am releasing into the world something that I'm not particularly pleased with. I'll probably go back again and edit when I have time but for now I'm sorry that this is what you're getting.

I'd also just like to say thank you again to anyone who has read this far, I appreciate you giving time to these bunch of words that I'm trying to mold into a half decent story!