Tobirama

It was disgusting.

It was like having butter in your mouth.

The lamp oil.

I didn't care. I'd had worse things in my mouth.

I held the bottle of lamp oil in my left hand, the staff that was on fire on one end in the other. My mouth was filled with the foul-tasting liquid, and I was careful not to breathe its fumes down too deeply into my lungs to avoid a chemical pneumonia.

I pressed my lips together, and with great force, I spit the oil out of my mouth directly at the fire so it bloomed out like a dragon spitting fire above me.

Fire blowing... My favourite form of art. My main discipline.

I turned round, twirled the staff in my right hand, the bottle of lamp oil behind my back. Then I lifted the staff and blew lamp oil on it again.

I not only loved how cool it looked, but when I blew fire, my mind always went into a state of complete freedom where I could contemplate things that needed to be contemplated. Usually, it was about my Madara and a soft wonder whether I would ever fall for him. Sometimes, it was a harsher wonder whether I would ever fall for anyone. But tonight, as I blew fire in the practice tent, it was about my life.

I had been a messy kid at school, one of those who could never sit still. As I got older, I struggled even passing my subjects. My parents became more and more disappointed the older I got as with time, the number of subjects I had failed increased.

But one thing I had in my life was my fire art.

Starting from when I was a kid and my mother had taken me to a circus practice, I found something I was really good at, which is something every child needs. Among circus disciplines such as hoop and silks and trapeze, fire art had quickly become my discipline of choice, even if I still practiced other disciplines as well as, when I became a teenager, weight lifting and doing cardio to keep in shape. The worse I got in school, the better I got in fire arts to compensate.

My parents wanted me to go to university. Instead, I'd found job after job abroad in different clubs as a performer. Two years ago, I'd gone viral on social media. Since then, I'd worked at the current beach club with my practice tent right next to it. The payment was unbelievable seeing how popular and well-off the club was, and my own popularity meant I could demand huge sums of money. Not that I needed it; as long as I had my body and somewhere to work out, I was happy. But I did know my worth. I was still working here, an unusual job for a thirty-four-year-old, and I thrived. And I knew I was lucky, since the prospects of jobs were sparse all around the globe right now, but especially here in this country.

And there was Madara, a man who made everything so much more interesting. Having graduated from machine engineering, the man was taking a couple of years off to travel the world and work as a bartender after having taken a short course in the art of mixology. As he had now also gotten another job here, I hoped he would stay for a while. 

For a long while...

I took the flask of lamp oil, poured some more into my mouth, contemplating how fascinated I was by the man. He was a university boy, his world so far from mine, and I could tell he was smart by his entire demeanour.

I blew the lamp oil out between my lips, pretending he was there, watching. The thought turned me on endlessly. I took more of the buttery liquid into my mouth, felt how it created a surface on my teeth. I blew again. Again and again. When I was finished, I was exhausted, sweaty, panting.

I went to the gym of the close-by hotel I had access to and worked out for another hour. 

Izuna

I had found myself a haven in the park.

Here, I could easily be taken for someone who belonged. A student studying while enjoying the sun. A lover waiting for their counterpart to show up. A worker enjoying a break. Anything, anything but an ex-ballerina who'd gotten diagnosed with diabetes type one and had thus lost everything, which was what I truly was.

It had begun after one of my Sunday trainings. On Sundays, I was always in the studio dancing for about six hours. That day, I'd experienced an insatiable thirst. Being thirsty after training for six hours in the heat wasn't unusual per se, but this was something else entirely, something I had never before experienced. I drank and drank and drank, but it was never enough. I woke up four times that night out of pure thirst. In the morning, I had felt enormously faint, and had an inexplainable craving for sugar that even I had trouble suppressing, despite having been drilled by the ballet world for so many years.

I went to the studio on the Monday. There, I fainted. It wasn't unusual per se, ballerinas fainting, but I had never. Nobody told me to go to the hospital, so I had forced myself to go. Every fibre of my body told me not to, to push it through, that I couldn't miss the two hours of practice and one hour of stretching I usually did on Mondays. But something else within me, something I didn't feel quite connected to, told me that this could be really, really bad, that if I didn't miss these three hours of training and stretching, I could miss many, many more in the future, maybe all of them.

Little did I know that the outcome would be exactly that.

In the hospital, they had taken blood tests, and a stern-looking doctor had come to tell me the news.

"Your blood glucose is thirty-three. You are in ketoacidosis."

I didn't understand anything, which I told the doctor.

"I don't understand anything", I said.

The doctor smiled sympathetically at me.

"Your blood glucose should be less than 7,8."

I frowned.

"But I never eat sugar", I said.

"Everything you eat is turned into sugar in your body", the doctor explained patiently. "Protein, fats, carbs. Usually, your pancreas produces insulin allowing the sugars to go into the cells to be used as fuel. You, however, have stopped producing insulin, so the sugar stays in the bloodstream." I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but I was still faint. "As your cells don't get their sugar as it stays in the bloodstream, the body stars a process breaking down fat to create more sugar."

"Why does it do that if the sugar can't go into the cells anyway?" I asked.

"The body can't distinguish between starvation caused by eating too little sugar, and starvation caused by the sugar being unable to go from the blood to the cells", the doctor said. "So your body breaks down fat to create sugar, and more and more sugar is accumulated which is why you've been thirsty. But there are rest products created in this process, causing your body to go into what is called ketoacidosis. It makes your blood acidic. It's very, very dangerous."

"What does this all mean?" I asked.

"I'm sorry", the doctor said. "But it means you've gotten diabetes type one."

The world started spinning around me. It wasn't a devastating piece of news such as a terminal disease would be, but I was just so confused about what it all meant. An autoimmune disease, the doctor explained, causing your own immune system to attack cells in your pancreas that produce insulin. Nothing I'd done wrong. Equal lifespan to a non-diabetic person if you handled it correctly.

And I was tossed into a world I wasn't prepared for as an in-patient; a world of blood tests and blood glucose and needles with insulin. For every time I ate, I needed to administer insulin enabling my cells to take the sugar up. If my blood glucose was low, I had to eat some fruit sugar. Even then, I had to take some insulin anyway. It was all very confusing.

But I soon got the hang of it. I soon learned to keep my blood sugar between 4 and 12. I got better at feeling what I needed intuitively. Within two weeks, they deemed I could be written out of the hospital, that I had learned enough to take care of myself.

So that wasn't the worst part.

The worst parts were firstly the cost of the in-patient stay and the insulin. My country provided nothing, absolutely nothing to protect me. It ruined me to pay for my hospital stay, and the weekly cost of insulin was astronomical, meaning I would hardly be able to afford it with my meagre income from the ballet company, so I would have to find myself a side job.

But the worst part, the absolute worst part of it all was that my ballet company kicked me out.

"Sorry. We cannot have dancers with diabetes. Too much of a hassle."

And just like that, I was completely without income, and had lost everything I owned except the clothes on my body, including my dreams.

I had looked for jobs. I had looked a lot. Every day, in fact. I had applied to every ballet company in the country as well as other jobs in restaurants and retirement homes and whatever I could think of and find. But nothing. The state of the world and the country didn't really allow ex-ballet dancers to work. And the more time I spent as homeless and unemployed, the more my chances of finding someone who desired to employ me diminished. Who would choose a small twenty-seven-year-old man who couldn't answer questions on current occupation or what they did during the day over literally anyone else? I had no money to pay for a place to stay, either, and not friends or family I could ask for a place to stay.

Keeping my lifespan within the normal range became a dream I could never achieve, my blood sugar levels going haywire as I tried to save as much insulin as possible while simultaneously being out of fruit sugar and food from time to time as my money first and foremost had to go to insulin. My life, so full of rigid training and stretching and dietary restrictions, was lost. Instead, I had to stay focussed on keeping myself alive from one day to the next.

On my darkest days, I had considered just stopping the insulin or administering a humongous dose, allowing myself to die. On other dark days, I regretted I had ever gone to the hospital, wishing I would have just had died then. But I kept going. Day by day, I kept going, not allowing myself to think, like a man being stuck on open ocean with nothing but horizon on either side, swimming in one direction praying it would be the one closest to land and that he would reach it before he starved. Some days, like today, which was sunny and which I could spend in the park with a small loaf of local bread, were easier. Others, when I had to find shelter beneath dirty bridges filled with syringes containing far more dangerous substances than my precious insulin, I didn't believe I could take it anymore. But I surprised myself every time. Whenever I believed I had reached my limit, I pushed that limit further away from me and kept going.

I lay down on the grass in the park, my trousers hanging loosely off my body, now smaller than ever when I was starving several days a week and had also lost muscle mass.

I still smiled when I allowed myself to think about dancing again.