Remedies for Lost Breath

thanatomania.
2 min readNov 1, 2021

Some days feel different yet so welcome. Like an old friend who comes to visit every once in a blue moon. It barely sits on the tip of your tongue, not jumping in to keep you at the edge of curiosity.

A familiarity that can only be reminisced, not recreated.

The air has changed lately. Has light littered it well enough that I can taste the sweetness of a forgotten yesterday? Every breath brings me back to what some call the “good old days", as if I have never aged a day.

Memories of sitting in random hallways, when obedience was a lesson of morals, less of a sparring ground. Its the way chatter long passed bounces between my nerves, immortalized in chapters written in such vivid color.

I have grown into pressing everything into a flat grey sheet, hope losing its shape to time. It was never meant to recoil back into its original form.

I was never meant to return to the museum I built as a child, yet excitement overpowers the dreary nature of the present.

The scent of many rides home pull seatbelts onto me. It could not prevent the whiplash of being taken back to the days of my ignorance. Bliss ruled my viewpoint once, and it heralds itself once more.

It sits menacingly as a reminder that running away from goodness is always my choice to make — a very futile and selfish one.

I could express a million sorrows and not flinch, but that is the challenge it poses to me. So many bottles of joy have been vaulted to keep the memory safe at the price of being forgotten.

Bliss tends to be right in the end — it is inevitable.

This time around, I have chosen to sit with a new kind of discomfort. I find myself cracking smiles and sneaking laughter in my lonelier hours, enjoying my own presence in the sincerest of moments.

Where winter subsides, spring brings forth flowers and feasts. I am not the seasons of my mind, but I only acclimate to the moments so tightly glued to my heart. It was always a tug-of-war between freedom and imprisonment, yet I did not acknowledge how both pulled on happiness with different motives.

I do not need a reason to be happy other than it feels good. The remedy to lost breath is often resting from conscience.

There is no shame remembering when things were happier. Such a past is worth cherishing, where both pain and joy are of equal value.

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