Life-Giving Air

“One day my life began” seemed a reasonable statement of fact. Now I'm not so sure. Or maybe it's that for me, associating life in my body with the date immortalized on my birth certificate feels absurd.

However fictionalized any birth story might be, I am aware of no facts, no myth, nothing I could use to mark my beginning. If I'm being honest, I can't imagine ever asking anyone to tell me my story. But lack of curiosity aside, I never heard either of my parents mention even the smallest, most insignificant detail about that long winter night. I doubt their oversight was unique to me, as I also never heard them accidentally reminisce about the other days they added people to the planet. It was as if, for my parents, there was nothing remarkable, memorable, or even noteworthy about birth.

I wonder sometimes if my inconspicuous beginning left some sort of birth-related scar — residual bloodless tissue that impairs memory — because so much of my earlier life failed to attach itself to my mind in a form I consciously recognize. Etiology aside, my unremembered life isn't a complete void. There are moments of clarity in the unseeable haze, trinkets from my everyday life, and a few scraps collected by my younger self — some so clear they can't possibly have come from the past, and others so broken I find it impossible to identify their link to the rest of humanity. Amongst the ordinary, there are deadening gaps of time, nameless people, suffocating ambient noise, and groundless, skinless, sleepless nights.

Last week at the gym, an acquaintance — an older Peruvian woman, an energy healer — was preaching energy. Making no apologies for her beliefs, she boldly touted that people are connected by air. In her eyes, people in close proximity inhale and exhale air — sharing air and thus sharing energy. She's nutty and lovely — and her conviction made me wonder: does air really matter?

My birth, that seemingly unremarkable event, was the moment when for me, like for the rest of human