Breath
“Everything is perfected by the breath,” I said “Orgasms, heartache, laughter, song, stillness…you just can’t do anything well in life without breath.” We dove into the topic for a long time after that, wondering then if it was the answer to everything. That was years ago. Elemental idealization becomes murky in the light of time and loss.
The strongest is the reeling. The chaos in thought. The things you wish you’d said instead of all the stupid meaningless shit you said instead. The moments you could’ve given more attention to.
It’s funny in the way that’s not actually funny but it throws you off so completely you feel a bit ridiculous. Like a bone chill on a hot day the tragic fuzziness that tends to come with terrible news.
The hits come unannounced, several times, like the wind has been knocked out of you. Because you have to accept that it’s real. That it’s happened. I stopped several times to breathe out, extending my hand to prop myself against a door or a wall so I didn’t collapse completely. There is such a power when someone leaves. If only he knew.
“But he was so young.” She said, looking up at me with raw reddened eyes.
I think about it for a moment. Like it matters. Like our measure of time and age means anything. This planet doesn’t seem to be convinced by the formalities we’ve all given to the matters of life and death. The Earth isn’t keeping track of us so much as the changing of each passing day. Instead of saying any of this, or adding a word of condolence, I say nothing.
We took turns feeling it throughout the day. Some of us crying, other’s fake smiling and filling the hours with projects. Death is never quiet in this way, it ripples and shakes the living immensely.
Like all of those who have gone before me, by some grand mystery and tragic coincidence, I feel the weight of it ten-fold. I tell myself not to fuck this up because of what they can’t do now. Telling myself not to waste a day because of all the ones they don’t get to have. I am in no position. I won’t be able to give them what I wish they could have had for themselves. A chance to live longer. A chance to fully embrace their own failures and measured moments. A chance to breathe forever.
Loving anyone is so dangerous. I’ll never forget the first time. We were both so young. I found out why he wasn’t answering my messages. A perfect being who wasn’t given any time. Forever frozen in my memory.
I walked by the rose garden in a daze. There will be no more summers for him. The flowers and greenery soaked vibrant light against the rising heat. If only I could live so eloquently. To live this beautifully. To somehow make it all matter. Everything laid out evenly, sectioned in equal parts shimmering with clarity. Like all the others I know their legacy is not up to me to save. I can’t gain back the time they’ve lost. I felt foolish standing zombified by the change. Staring off into the foliage swaying in the sickness of sudden grief while unknown bugs hissed around me. I am ashamed by the weight, invisible to others that I will carry nonetheless, of living still while he cannot.
I see him now in my most recent memory, of just days ago. I still can’t understand it. How one day they are there, real and moving, and gone in an instant. In an impossible moment that I wasn’t there for. The simple sweetness of the unknown. Our conversation would have been so different. How I would have lingered. Savoring everything. Annoying him endlessly with questions. I would have given him a thousand hugs. I would have told him how much he mattered to me, to everyone he knew.
I want to be wrong about breath. I want to believe that breath isn’t just for the living. I have no evidence outside of my dreams. That maybe I’ll see him there like the others who paid me a passing visit on their way to nowhere. I’ll be given that and feel unworthy of it just the same.
I remember each of them, looking opaque yet vapor-like suspended in time, like they had become a whisper or the tiny spotted sound of a popped bubble.