Trachea

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It takes me a long time to arrive and I’m still unsure if I have been written, resisting the residence of my rests, fearing my ferocious letter, precedent to me. In closing, a gentle souffle takes hold. My life is burning its borders, unfolding anguish, erasing foundations.

The task to exercise my inapt airs is impaired by a body that can’t be said. I inhale my first person, exhaling from the lungs of thirds. With eyes closed, I see the trachea resurfacing, the tube lodged in my chest’s mist, struggling to traverse my half jolts.

Your air is blocked, she informs me; her job – vis a vis the larynx and the bronchi – to ease the air’s passing.       

I speak with unseen beings since childhood, I tell her. They are locked inside me, and I’m arrested here too, I attempt to explain, my head in horizontal position, cleansing my eyes with the mucus bursting from my nose, unmeasured void unfit to paper.

This cylindric, tubular organ, insists. She wants to diameter with me and bring back the respiratory system to heat, humidify, and filter the air, leading it into the lungs.

Anguish and breathing are lovers in a deadly plea, I continue, if one prevails, the other expires.

And like so, she succeeds me, killing my emptiness with her oxygen at my faulting moment, demanding life, working despite myself and rescuing my tired eyelids, soaked by nightly tears.

All this to explain how the story of my body is predetermined by its uninterrupted fluids, dripping when my speech fails, unsure of my quartered pieces, of this corporality which speaks to me from unveiled places, listening, sending messages, enabling a voyage of my absent beneficiaries. Caused and moved by this uneven desire, I long for a host.