Mathematics

I like to think that the sum of human experience--
every emotion, every exhilaration, and every defeat--
can be inhaled with each
ordinary, unspectacular breath.

Some-
times
I drive the highway on a
boring, busy afternoon, some drab lunchbreak from work,
and my life bubbles within me;
the heaving air halts on its way to my lungs
and triggers streaming thoughts
that flash like a strobe light,
crash around like bumper cars
or a pinball machine:

I see
a snowcapped mountain I climbed in the warmth of autumn,
bathing in the swelling salt of the Pacific,
leaping from bridges into low rivers,
watching childbirth with hands gripped,
numb with fright and excitement--
all these smiles upon all these faces,
icicles that grow like stalactites over my doorway,
bloodied noses, casts and stitches,
summer blowing its humid air into our deteriorating house
along with a symphony of crickets
and the sweet smell of a just-cut ballfield,
modern buildings rising like phoenixes
from the tombs of old structures,
and so on.

I am not the first
nor the last to recall these memories,
to breathe these slivers of eternity.
These experiences are intimately mine,
yet communal, shared,
like a jumbled storyboard
pieced with images from countless different films,
as if every single ceaseless second--
all sixteen frames' worth--
was made of
heartbeat fragments from other lives,
in technicolor.

There's reincarnation all around us.
Every breathed particle a small bit of everything else,
every taught or inherited trait a subtle homage to
countless others.
The very nature of life is cyclical,
and we are entangled within it,
looping back around,
rising up then lying down.
Moment follows moment, life follows life.
Just like that.