Number seven

I just lost my sixth camera.

Maybe it's irony, maybe it's sod's law, maybe it's getting really really excited about Father Christmas imminently getting me a better camera and therefore putting my cheap, non-pretty, non-white one down somewhere in Miyazaki and leaving it there, but I lost it. Six. In one year.

"That's six," my friends pointed out ingeniously as I rifled through my bag, cussing like a sailor.
"I know."
"In one year."
"I know."
And then - for some reason I am going to try my hardest not to identify - they all cheered, high fived each other and exchanged money.

I wonder if this is what life is like, but on a smaller scale. Lose a camera: hurt. Get another, less nice camera. Lose a camera: hurt a little less. Get another, even less nice camera. Lose a camera: hurt a little less. And so on and so forth until you're fifteen years and twenty really, really crap cameras in and all you can think is meh. I didn't like it anyway. And the habit's kind of worn the pain out.

"You okay?" one of my friends asked after he'd pocketed his ill gotten gains and wiped the tears of joy from his face.
"Yeah. It's not exactly a new experience, is it. The sting left a decade ago."
"You're going to get another one?"
"Yep. And then I'm going to start another book. It's called A Life Spent Buying Cameras. Because there's a really big chance that when I die, buying cameras is the only really consistent, reliable thing I'll have ever done."
"You know what I think?"
"What?"
"Maybe you can learn to stop leaving them on trains."
"We've all got a destiny, Shin. And for better or worse, losing cameras and replacing them again appears to be mine."

I'm getting another camera, and I've decided that the pattern needs to stop. This one is not going to be even cheaper and more terrible, just so that it means nothing to me. It's going to be big, and bright, and expensive. And instead of not caring on purpose so that it doesn't hurt when it goes, I'm going to love it so much that when I lose it it'll hurt again like it did in the beginning. I'm going to put myself on the line again. So that I'm no longer so horribly resigned to my own inevitable failure, and no longer investing in my own inescapable crapness.

I'm buying number seven, and pretending it was number one all over again. Because what the alternative says about what life does to us and to me and to cameras is too intolerable.

And all I can hope is two things. One: that this is one I can hold onto. And two: that nobody tells my dad.