My lips are sore and rubbed raw. My wrist aches, and my butt is throbbing from sitting on hard chairs all day. And as I carry my case to the car, the only thought going through my fevered mind is, “So this is what it’s like to be a professional musician.” No excitement met my thought. No thrill of joy to finally be living the dream. It was just a dull, blank emptiness. I could hardly do more than grunt to the questions my Grandma posed to me about my day, and I felt like skipping dinner so I could sink into sleep. Even now, sitting on the futon, a chill runs through me, and I have a horrible feeling I have a fever.

The hardest thing about being me right now is being away from my family while this camp goes on. It wasn’t my choice to have it here in Fairbanks, which is conveniently where my grandparents live, but a whole 6 hours drive from my home. It wasn’t my first choice to play French horn the whole time of this summer camp, which lasts ten days, eight hours a day. Almost two weeks of having my lips fail, sputter, and start to bleed. For eight hours a day. No wonder I’m exhausted in advance. I want to be able to pick up my first instrument, violin, and just play! Not to practice with a tuning CD, not to play passages backwards. Just to play, for the sake of playing.

But I feel like I can’t get up. I’m shivering, and it’s taking all of my effort to type these words, to just get my thoughts out on paper, even though my thoughts are barely audible through the exhausted static in my head. It’s like a radio. Just a drained crackle, with blips of voices, like a thought is trying to come through. I’m not even hungry anymore, even though dinner smells good downstairs; at least, I suppose it smells good, to somebody who cares. I guess the little workers in my brain said, “Well, let’s all go on coffee break,” and nobody came back. Everything’s shut down. I feel empty. I just want to sleep, and get ready for the next exhausting day.