i'm born. i draw breath. i see the way others do it and it's an unconscious motion. i breathe in time with the people around me. i grow accustomed to the way i breathe.
breathing this way, i start to notice that other people seem to breathe out of sync with me. why do they breathe that way? i ask, and i learn that some people just don't breathe the same way most others do. it's okay. it's okay. i continue on. i learn to notice the syncopation around me. i adjust my meter.
i grow older and i begin to breathe more heavily. i notice myself trying to match my rhythm with some of the others i've noticed. i just want to see how it feels. i've been breathing the same way my whole life. there's a hiccup here. a spasm there. sometimes i'm underwater and i have to hold my breath. i come up out of sync with the people around me. i wonder if they notice. i wonder if i should make it clear.
i meet someone who breathes the same way i do. we laugh in sync. we inhale and exhale in sync. sometimes we fall out of step, but it's okay. the way their breath feels on my skin feels nice. i continue to breathe the same air as them. but soon it becomes stale. it doesn't feel right anymore. i start to ask why, but there's never a clear answer. soon they knock the wind out of me. they leave. the air clears, but for the first time, i feel like i'm suffocating. i've lost my rhythm. but no one knows it was gone in the first place.
soon i try and find it again. i do. it's different than it was a long time ago, but i found it. for a while i try and sync myself up with others when i notice i'm not on their beat. but gradually they start to notice that sometimes my rhythm is off. some of them are okay with it. some of them feel i've dirtied the air around them.
sometimes i still pretend. sometimes i still have to match someone else's time. often the people around me are in 4/4 time and i'm doing a waltz. i have to pause, hold my breath, and join back in on the beat. but sometimes i let slip that my rhythm is just different from everyone else's. hopefully one day this web of expansions and contractions all happening at different times will be okay. for now i'm just a cog in a machine, an anomaly looking for its place.