I’m afraid of the air outside my mouth, just beyond my teeth cold and drying, the air shredding the moisture away with gentle ripples of evaporation. It hangs, its hands dangling, carrying nitrogen, carbonic clusters, and many hidden things — particulate fragments, tiny points of inhumane malignancy, threatening with acidic gestures amongst the inevitability that I will draw a breath, a caustic burst that will fill the vacuum of my scorched lungs. I’m afraid to let the outside in.

It’s in me, my chest’s expanded, these membranes, porous, the elements the air drove into my inner flesh enter my blood, osmosis. I am oxygenated, a stranger’s cigarette nestles between red cells, magnetized by iron, slowly saturating, my head is light, I have metabolized, I must relinquish this baggage, soiled, unrepairable... carbon dioxide feeds my potted plants as it spills back over my dry cold teeth. This cloud was in me, it is me, I am expanded, porous.

My boundaries expand, rushing to the horizon, I am entropy, I fill all space. The edge of this ripple fades, a sphere, and I am endless, I am no more — the dark at the end of the light, it is fearless.

A pebble trapped beneath my shoe — tacky, adhesion inherited from passing gum — is dragged across the asphalt until it is seized by a slab’s seam. I was preoccupied, my autonomic biological processes were at the moment, not ensured, my heart would not always beat, I may never take another breath. All those breaths I squandered in foul air. All that air I burnt and inhaled, I made stale, it stained my teeth, and I became preoccupied, anxious, afraid of air, afraid my autonomic biological processes would stop at any moment. I remember, she laid on the floor and begged us to call an ambulance, we knew she had inhaled something she burned, and all her cells, her porous cells, they told her, your heart will stop, you will not breath, we knew she wasn’t in any danger other than — the kind of psychological danger that will haunt a person forever, repeating, and reappearing. I remember, I was lying in a bed, the music forcing my heart to beat faster, and faster, and it threatened to stop, I knew I wasn’t in any danger, but I begged them to call the ambulance, because my heart would stop, I would stop breathing. I lost consciousness, my head was on the asphalt, under the rain, my vision restored, I hadn’t been there for a minute, five minutes, endless, I had been afraid. I had dreamed of the forest, a mile beyond my house, we were hidden in the forest, a lawless place, unsupervised, a bucket a bottle, foil, it burned, I breathed, and then I stopped breathing. I could not draw a breath. I could not find my breath. My lungs, they were entropy, they shattered, particulate fragments. I lay on the path, under the trees, next to the dirty creek that flowed down through suburban Maryland, towards the soiled river, through stained teeth, into the Chesapeake. Those people in Bhopal, my sister barging into my room with dying lung, the inevitable explosive decompression, as we dangle, expanding, rushing to the horizon, filling all space, everything is breathing, I’m a pebble dragged across the asphalt, seized by a slab’s seam. I can’t trust the air, I will breathe. Little leaps of faith, little clouds, carbonic clouds, expanding.