Breathing.

By Jessica Lynn

Every day you breathe in and breathe out, but when you can’t breathe in the scent of someone that reaches inside of you and burns your soul red like a hot ember, then what’s the point? Everything is fine until you know what you’re missing. Everything is fine until you remember the feeling. Everything is fine until the food has no taste, the music has no melody, and there is no warmth that is warm at all next to the memory of his touch.

Going through the motions day after day, breathing in, breathing out. That’s not living. Living is loving something other than yourself. For every experience you can have is multiplied by a thousand when you have the love of another making you feel every little emotion more acutely. With love warming your heart, you can appreciate the cold and not resent it. With love tingling beneath your finger tips you can touch someone and not only feel them, but feel them, feeling you. With love you feel the passion in your heart as an unbearable craving to burn it into them like a brand. Painful, yet exquisite, pulling you in, changing you forever. It’s a chemical reaction. Creating something powerful from a raw, unadulterated, need to reach inside of someone and make an impression upon their heart.

How does someone simply go back to breathing after something like that? It’s complicated, messy, it makes you shiver, it makes you shake, and it moves the earth beneath your feet. It becomes an addiction, complication. Simplicity holds no attraction, no relaxation. Sunlight doesn’t seem as stunning, or moonlight as magical. Waves crash around you and you remember how they would once crash into you. Cold wind feels so chilling, because the heat no longer resides within you. So what is life without passion? It’s standing in the middle of a crowded room where no one is touching, no one is talking, no one is thinking, and everyone might as well be wearing white because colors have no color. You just stand there, breathing in, and breathing out. Hearing the minutes of your life tick by so loudly in your ears that it’s slowly driving you insane. Listen to it, it’s trying to tell you something, as it gets louder and louder.

Then, the ticking stops and the intimate warmth of the one you’ve missed grazes across the back of your shoulder. The lightest, simplest, of touches and yet you know exactly who it was as if their touch was as identifiable to you as a fingerprint. All of the colors in the room come into focus, your heart beats wildly to greet them, sounds of laughter and music penetrate your senses, and it feels as chaotic as a car crash and then as simple as someone turning on the light, all at the same time. Hot breath at your ear and yet you can feel the heat of it tip toeing up your spine, making you breathe in long and deep, holding in the sensation, almost afraid to exhale. Because suddenly, the breaths you take have become more important. They’ve become moments shared, breathing someone in to your heart, every moment of every day, and it’s in that moment that you remember why we breathe at all.