A few weeks ago, I said that I’d post at least one piece of content per week. I was doing well at it too, until 5 days of festival madness got between me and my laptop.

So I’m behind schedule now. Sorry. I’ll make it up to you though, I promise: to start pushing the numbers back up again, I’m publishing one of the (many) fragments of stories that litter my computer, which I start but never finish, as is my wont. Here goes.

[Begins]

You can do a lot of things if you just put your mind to it. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself as I run up these goddamn stairs.

Like, if you just imagine that you feel lighter than air and you’re flying, you can forget that you’ve sprinted up fourteen floors without a break. Like, if you imagine that you’re a superstar athlete in the prime of health, then you can forget that your lungs are about to give in. Forget that all those cigarettes you smoked, beers you drank, and shitty speed you snorted over the weekend have left your body feeling torn up and dirty on the inside.

Yeah, right.

The long and short of it, the crux of the matter if you will, is that I don’t feel lighter than air, or like an athlete in the prime of health. I feel much more (to put my finger right on it, to cut to the chase, to hit the nail smack bang on the head) like I’m about to fucking die.

By which I mean, I feel like I’m about to fucking die, metaphorically. Because there’s only a slim fucking chance that someone my age – 35, thanks for asking –  would die from running up a whole bunch of stairs, regardless of being in such terrible shape and hungover to hell. That’s just a bit of poetic license. Straight up hyperbole, is what it is.

Whereas if I stop running right now, and collapse in a heap on the floor like my legs so badly want me to, there’s a pretty good chance that when whichever thick-skulled goon is on the floor below catches up with me, I will fucking die, in a very concrete, literal, unpoetic sense.

[Ends]