A breath is so long
A breath is so long.
Long enough to feel the weight, blink, live a thousand years, just to open your eyes down here. Wake up and feel how substantial and restricted this body, this world is. How the heaviness of bones and flesh keeps you indentured and bound to the ground, though it is this body that is indentured and not you. All of you is mass, palpable, physical mass, and the mass is ripping at the seams like froth boiling on the inside, and every minute, every second, you force the particles back to their place, make the gelatinous chunks of being nearly tessellate just to hold the form. This is humanity; even the murky lighting takes adjusting to, and the air burns all the way down your sinuses – but it is not your breath that lingers. Shivering, writhing, raspy, the disrupted air turns into a thought, a cry, a cough, a prayer, a whisper, a reminder.
There he is, blinding, dying. The arrested breath takes breath away from these organs that are used but unused by you. What a hurting world it is, what a dark, sharp world, light shattering around his features bent by pain, but what beauty. He is the only one made of colour; after him the earth is gray, desaturated as the waking moment after a nightmare (you know it, though you do not dream). Inside his mind you see a thousand and more colours, the colour of his pain: bright strontium red, sanguine as the blood boiling in and slowly out of his veins, the iron, the ivory, charcoals, all splintered like a twice broken mirror.
Thus, seeing comes after hearing, hearing what human ears can’t find from the tangible air vibrating, crackling between him and you, him and this distantly familiar body of a human. A soft susurrus of the wind is making the night go quiet, or maybe it is the wind whistling through the puncture in his chest. Other senses follow after, and they destroy you just as you destroy this vessel barely containing what you are, what would otherwise destroy the air around the both of you, certainly destroy him, the man you have come to resurrect.
For he is near death already, near enough that the edge of death and living, everything and nothing is violently blurred. A reaper awaits in the shadow, looming, ready for the end of his breath. When the air stalls, when it is spent from his lungs, it will be too late. You will have to leave this body, where you have just made yourself commodious, and descend to hell instead. But you are just in time.
He can see you now, because you are particles, you are substance instead of wavelength and the blinding light of grace. And the particles you are inhabiting, inhibiting, suddenly react in a way that is unexpected; although that is surely a veiled excuse, one made to absolve you from all the pained, pulsating emotion that there is. You are here to save him, and he fills this kenopsic space (that may also be you) with his human existence.
What is the feel of skin, of touch? you wonder, stretching out your hand as if he were the one holding grace. It is less than a blink, less than the moment separated from the living breath that you live, so he cannot see you; every moment seeing, he forgets. But he can feel, as your fingers brush the pore-particles, and his mind turns from static pain to cerulean, as you gently repair the soul and body cleaved into pieces. The pain fumbles out of him.
You think you see a tremble of an eyelash. Morning pierces through; sunlight burns and illuminates so that the quietness is now hopeful, like the hour before the waking up and bustling of life; not abandoned, only pending. His light, his morning, felt in the gleam of the watering eye, wetness of an eyelash. A breath is long enough for falling, transcending quadrants to somewhere you have never been before. Not dying, but seeing, saving. The fizzling air releases from between his soft lips.
Another breath follows.