Counting Up The Days (Camren)

After (The Other Life)

In many ways Miami and LA are pretty similar: they’re both next to the sea, there’s plenty of beaches with bikini clad women on them all year round, there are people who’ve made it big time living within a two block distance of those who haven’t even been able to make enough money to feed their four kids for four weeks running. But that’s about where the similarities end and a list of a length Santa would be proud of can begin.

Where Miami has a vibrant culture and a melting pot of people living and laughing and being, Los Angeles has people swaying from the top of buildings and more waitresses than people in any other kind of profession. Miami has life and feeling and music and dance, LA produces the music but doesn’t sing it on the streets because making it mechanically in studios is for the money not for the life. Everything is plastic and paper, a paper plastic city built on the pretense that there are angels just waiting for you around the next corner. Sometimes even I am dragged into thinking that you will only be able to see an angel once you sway a little too violently on top of that building. LA is a ghost town, for those both living and dead- it doesn’t take long to become one of them.

During those studio days, during down times and breaks, I would make my own music and feel so alive, then I’d be force fed the sounds they wanted and all our eyes would become pits. Then when the time came for everyone to go back to their paper homes or plastic families we would be left alone to wonder the glass streets, usually alone.

It is my belief in the fact that in even the worst of places you can still find a safe haven which keeps me sane on the worst days. I had found mine on one of our first trips to LA, when I still believed that everything that glittered in the city was gold. It was a tattoo parlour, where a couple of years later they would make a dragonfly become a part of me. I was not drawn to the place because of the tattoos or the noise or the fact that it was the only shop still open at ten to midnight on a Thursday in the middle of December, it was because of the neon lights.

Those neon lights could have lit up the whole fucking city on their own, bathed it in their holy light, washed the ocean in more colours than a rainbow could behold. Like a firefly to a lamp I went.

Ashley was the first tattoo artist I had ever met, and whatever my predisposed image was of what one should look like it definitely wasn’t her. A young twenty something year old college dropout, piercings dotted around her body almost more in number than the constellations of freckles on her cheeks and nose, long dark purple hair with seemingly random streaks of bleach and a thick fringe framing her face, and eyes as dark as a night holding a new moon but as piercing as looking at the sun straight on- but no tattoos, not a single one in site. She later would confess to me that she did have one tattoo, two spirals of different sizes joined together, right in the center of her scalp, but she had covered up that story just as tightly and strongly as her mass of hair had hidden the inking.

When I first walked into the room, still blinded by the neon lights outside, I was greeted by her. One hand on her hip, a smile playing on her lips and a string of words I barely heard about how I wasn’t fooling her with my age but if I wanted a place to stay for a bit I was more than welcome to sit by her and watch her work for a while until my parents came to pick me up.

In short, she’s the kind of woman poets write poetry about but never publish.

I’ll just say the only thing that you want to hear about right now, yes we did have a thing on and off. When Camila was off she was on, she knew that what we had was a friendship but I think we both used each other to feel less alone when we needed it.

Now though I did need her to feel less alone but, from the arm of another girl draped around her neck which I only noticed  once I had walked all the way in and adjusted myself to the light (I swear those neon signs became brighter every time), I knew all I would be getting is the friendship kind of support which I can admit even came as a bit of a relief. We’d had our run, but it was probably time to move on- I had (past tense) and now she was (present tense).