The simple, mad truth about me was that I was a liar when it came to effort. I had a habit to promise, to overpromise on most days, and to somehow, while braving impossible odds, deliver. It was a common thread, running through the eyelets of my years, woven together in the name of magnanimous effort or none at all. I possessed no sense of scale when it came to it. To my simplemindedness, effort was effort, and the lack of it was the lack of it. There was no such thing as more effort; there was no such thing as less of it. There was only the doing of things. There was only moving the Earth itself to keep your word, and I had a habit of giving my word for things I did not know how to do, things I did not have the slightest, the faintest idea about. I spent my days and many sleepless nights armed with only an absurd confidence in my ability to find the answers as I go, if at all.
There was an odd, inexplicable trust in me. The little I managed to do in life came from this very trust. There was also arrogance in me. The effort I managed also came from this sheer arrogance. On most days, I was but a clueless pebble, kicked or plopped into the rapids without a path in mind, only movement around. On some days, I managed to find shore regardless. I did not believe in some colossal power dictating the course of our lives. A pebble does not know where it lands; it only knows to resist being obliterated on the way. We were no marionettes. All we had with us were our words and the will to stick to them for as long as we could. If we held onto them for long enough, we managed to do fantastic things. I did not know what I was writing with this madness I carried my life with: was this the making of something greater, or was I going to be a cautionary tale?
But I did not concern myself with this question often. There was always work to do; there were always promises to keep. My days were only my days, as far as I was concerned. The rest was up to the river to decide.