So, now, I’m pretty hungry. This happens quite a lot, I suppose. Maybe it’s laziness, or maybe it’s something else. I’m lying on my side in the new studio, with none of my stuff here apart from what’s in my rucksack, listening to my stomach rumble until I get so hungry that it seems to stop bothering to even rumble.

I don’t know what it is. It’s not that I don’t value myself, which I’m sure is what a psychologist would say is the case. It’s more that I know that I can survive for ages without eating, and pushing my body in the vague direction of its limits is satisfying, in that I feel more alive than I ever otherwise do. I’ve heard of people who go running for something like fifty or sixty miles across the countryside—and not just the flat countryside in Kent, but the hilly countryside up near Sheffield—just so they can feel the same feeling. It’s as though, because they are pushing their bodies to their outermost limits, they can feel their mortality. Like, they go right up to the edge of what it means to be alive, and look over it and down at the huge, immeasurable void below, and feel joy because they’re not in the void, but above it. That’s what being alive is. But, normally, people don’t see over the edge and witness the contrast between the everythingness of life and the nothingness of death, so they don’t feel or understand that life is exhilarating, like those runners do.

I know it’s a bit different for me. Neither the void or the cliff above it look the same to me as they do to normal people. The void, for me, has stuff in it, so it’s not a void anymore; and the cliff is engulfed by a black and measureless haze. Still, I like to push my body toward its limits. Or, rather, I like to pretend my body has limits. I like to feel the pain of hunger and imagine that the next step after that pain is death. It’s annoying, though. That peak feeling of being right at the edge is always out of my reach. I could stay here, on the floor of Studio A14, Kora Biscuit Factory Studios, for several days, even several weeks, months, years, whatever, and I’d still be able to get at least partway up and crawl to a food source, eat, and recover fully; and if I was really weak, so weak that I couldn’t get up and move, I’d still stay alive, just lying here in a coma, for years and years and years, my body refusing to properly die until the Sun came down and engulfed the Earth.