And why shouldn't I sporadically post random pieces of shortstories? This will be concluded at a later date:

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Maybe you've felt like this before. Maybe extreme circumstances have forced a physical manifestation of your concerns in the form of malfunction, deterioration, and pain. Maybe for you it was fleeting; a day or a week of pushing yourself beyond what your mind is readily able to admit you are consistently capable of.

To me, this is now the constant with which I define my life. I look in the mirror and a stranger stares accusingly back at me. The sunken eyes, the thinnning hair, the pale skin and the slight sheen of sweat that perpetually covers the features of the image that stares at me that is not a reflection of me, but a demonstration of the sacrifices I have made in the name of a cause that is greater than myself.

I have taken the extreme, and made it my everyday existence. But we're not built to live like this. I'm not built to live like this. And every morning as I wake, I am reminded of that fact in the bluntest sense. I am dying.

After another normal night of thoroughly disturbed sleep, I roll over and dangle my legs off the side of the bed. My breath comes in ragged gasps, and old pains work their way across the entirety of my body, most noticably across my chest and down my back. My skin is clammy, my hands are cold for no reason I can think of, not that I can think this early anyway. I run a damp hand through my receding hair, a comfort gesture.

An overwhelming urge to cough overcomes me, and as I start to hack reflexively, my weak body convulses in response to a psychologically fabricated problem. It is at this moment that the headache that never leaves me announces itself with full vigour. Despite the pain that makes my brain feel as though my it is attempting to expand beyond the confines of my skull, I gather my willpower and try to open my eyes enough to see through them.

It takes a while. At first, there is nothing but a haze of almost-light. A patch of light grey with smears of indefinable colour dotted inside it. Innumerable blinks and much rubbing of the eyes later, and the image slowly resolves itself into a weak beige curtain covering the room's sole window and an oak dresser topped with the various lethal brik-a-brak that I tend to surround myself with as standard.

I'm in pain, I need a hit big-time, but however much I suffer, there is no room for complacency. I take the time to scan the room. My memory isn't what it used to be, but my ritual of burning the contents of the room and their exact position allows me to recall every detail. Nothing has moved. Nothing has disappeared. Nothing new has arrived. I don't bother with any self-assuring gestures like a sigh of relief. If my guard had dropped to the extent that anyone could get to me here, I'd be dead already. This is just old habit; and old habits die hard - thankfully, even the good ones. Old men just die slowly...

0 message(s) of denial

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