What Breath Carries

Each exhale holds what we cannot see— a trace of yesterday's salt tears, the ghost of every word we swallowed. We are small factories of invisible weight. The air between two people is a conversation that happens before the mouth opens, before the throat shapes sound. Someone breathes in what you released and it becomes part of their lungs, their blood, the story they will tell. You have been breathing the world since the first moment of panic and light, taking in the atoms of lost lovers, of mountains worn to sand, of stars that died before your ancestors learned to look up. Every breath is a small forgetting and a small returning, the body's way of saying I was here, and I will let go, I will take what comes next.