Do you ever wonder about your breath?
So much so,
that it begins to lose its rhythm?
You become incredibly aware of each release,
each intake,
each beat,
So much so that you can no longer breathe without thinking about breathing.
You become acutely aware of how fragile the rhythms of your breath are—
How interruption can come at any moment,
How any moment can be distorted by your awareness,
your awakening,
your helplessness,
your intent on regulating, controlling, steering
each breath
until it resembles nothing of its intrinsic state,
until you can no longer,
and interruption sets you on an unexpected course
of arrhythmic breaths
and immense fear, panic and pain.
This is what I became aware of
as the procession of black cars crossed my path of vision.
My breath
As we drove past perfect little rows of headstones
to a final resting place
I could hear the beats repeat in static
My breath was wrong
I understood the goodbye—
It wasn’t monumental,
It wasn’t irrelevant,
It’s not that death should be perceived as something so absurd or abstract
It’s not that one should fill themselves with sorrow or intense emotion
But loss creates these pains
and a disturbing sense of finality
a forever loss
I knew I would miss you
and my heart stopped
My breath was lost
the sun was colder
the sky was smaller
the air was thicker
I knew these things,
lucid—
but for this moment they lived on the peripheral
As did the pictures my mind was snapping
You so small against the earth
You smiling at the sky
You full of ideas and plans
You yesterday
I stood there in my arrhythmia
Helpless
Heartbroken
Breathless
Afraid that breath would never be real again
That my awakening
my awareness
would forever remove
the ignorance of the rhythm
the life sustaining ignorance
But breath comes back
It does that—
Breath comes back
with release,
with surrender,
Breath comes
with it’s own beautiful rhythm
with the knowledge that you will not suffocate
with the understanding that breath is not yours to rule
It will come back
If you just let it
You will breathe again
There are some things you need only feel
Some things you can not orchestrate
Love
Loss
Change
Breath—
They are there as you’ve always known them
but different
your awareness brings them life
Your perception
dictates their reality.
.
Relephant:
Breathe. {Poem}
.
Author: Jeana Sager
Editor: Yoli Ramazzina
Photo: Flickr/Tess Mayer
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