Counting Up The Days (Camren)

After (Reunions)

It didn't go white this time, or black. I didn't wake up with a machine which had taken the place of my heart. It just went blank. Blank isn't a human colour, it isn't a feeling that can be described with a word, it isn't even a feeling in the sense we have given it. You need to experience it to truly know what blank is. It is a nothingness so deep a shark would drown in it, it is a living so shallow a shrimp would suffocate.

I didn't wake up in a hospital bed because I didn't black out or stop breathing, I just stopped existing. And there isn't a medical condition for that.

The last bit of rope I had been relying on had finally frayed beyond repair and had let me go tumbling into the abyss that is blank. I could live (just) with the numbness that the lack of Camila caused, the sleepless nights without her soothing words sending me to unconsciousness better than any lullaby, and her waking thoughts stretching my mind to places it had never been taken whilst her lips did the same thing to my body and soul. But at least through all of it I had had Lucia, and now even she was going to leave me behind in the same sort of way.

Is it fair? Is it fair of me to let her walk away knowing I will never forgive her? Is it fair to sacrifice all the moments of ecstasy and love because of the pain, loss and tears that seemed more than just a side effect? Is it fair for me to make her shackle herself down with me? Probably not, but a broken person is desperate and a broken person will use anything it can leech onto to help them at least feel less broken. It's all in the mind. They might not be able to fix you but at least they might make you able to feel a little less shattered, a little less lifeless.

So my annual holidays ended, just like they had began, with a loss and lack of life. I was back to stone zero, or even minus one, for I had lost a lover just as much as I had lost my closest friend.

It was blank for a day and then it went grey. Grey because of what had happened and grey because of what was about to come. Grey is exactly what we describe as the colour, it is bleak and filled with a thick sheet blinding us from the rainbow. Not only was Lucia leaving me but the void of going back to work hung over me once more, and this time it would be without Camila. In a way it was a relief that she wouldn't be there as a physical reminder of what my present could have been, but the pain dominated over the fact that her sole presence wouldn't be there to comfort and guide me through the bleakness and shackles that are the industry.

There was a day left to pack up my suitcase (which was as much a home as anything else was), a day to sit by the fire after rushing down that snowy slope for a final time, barely caring if I hit a tree or went off course, in a way hoping for it, hoping for a reason to delay going back.

The day came though just like it was had to. This time alone, there was another flight to another place and to another set of new people. The people, that's what made the journey bearable. Dinah, Normani and Ally all already at the hotel laying on beds and plugged into individual devices. Two years ago the place would already have been a tip, there would be no room for your own thoughts surrounded by so much noise and laughter, excitement would be palpable and nerves would be at a record breaking high- until the next big event.

It's not like we didn't love each other anymore, that we didn't love what we were doing, we had just grown used to each other's presence and the constant moving about and new opportunities. In short, we had grown up. In other words, the person causing the most excitement and mess had gone. The lack of her presence was palpable in every way, in the bowl of bananas at the entrance, in the fact that there was only one person in Dinah's room, in the orderliness of the floor and there being no obscure lyricist blasting from portable speakers.

Once I had announced my presence they still did the age old greeting rushing towards me and enveloping me in a bear-like group hug all talking over each other asking me about how I was and what I'd been doing. I laughed, the action not being forced for once, over the fact that I was finally seeing their faces and hearing their homely voices again. A month is a long time when they're closer to me then a lot of the people that I share my last name with.