a breath with substance
By hent03 on February 18, 2022 5:46 am
I wrote a short story about sighs, and the sort of people who collect them. The first three lines are true, the rest is fiction. You can read it here if you are so inclined. I put a snippet below, which is where the title comes from.
"Sighs seem like such simple things on the face of it. A breath in, followed by a breath out. What even separates a sigh from an ordinary breath, you may wonder. There are of course scientific explanations, but they are often dry and uninteresting. They focus on the act as if it is a release valve for a complex machine, which, to be fair, it is.
To my mind, however, a sigh is a breath with substance. It carries something beyond its mechanical functionality. We put some small part of ourselves in each one, and then we attempt to expel it. Sometimes we are successful, but more often we are not. We sigh again. As our feelings change, so too do our sighs."
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial (BY-NC)