I could not say if I liked it, but I had a habit of touching death and coming back. I would go for days, engrossed in work, barely eating a thing. I would not sleep for days, guzzling a gazillion cups of coffee to fuel the leftover husk of my body, only to work and get things done. This habit, this self-destruction in the name of work, love, or purpose, was how I remembered myself. I reckon it’s how so many others remembered me, too. I could not be too sure. We could not be too sure how others remembered us, if at all. They say everyone has a fatal flaw. I could not be too sure what mine was, but I reckon this may be it—this taste for a dance with death. I wonder what they say about me when I’m not in the room. Everyone has something to say about everyone else.
He drinks too much, it will take him away, they say for some. He’ll smoke his life away, they say for someone else. He’ll work himself to death, is how they must describe me, and for what? I have no job, no career to show for it, only some absurd projects here and there, and these words are my claim to fame. It was work still; who was to say it wasn’t? It was just work that mattered to me—honest work. It was the only work I was capable of doing. I often forgot to eat or sleep, not because of some pursuit or fire, but out of simple forgetfulness. Once stuck on something, my one-track mind took a long time to look at something else. This dictated the little love I found, the way I worked, and even how I talked.
I regularly hit the hay with exhaustion that knew no bounds, with nausea all over my being, a throbbing head, a body that hurt immensely, a mind that barely worked, lost in a trance of exhaustion. I worked myself like a trusty mule. I did not know any other way. Everything in a day was too important for tomorrow, and given my penchant for dancing with death, I could never trust it would come.