Air

Air and I are on the outs.  Air refuses my advances yet again, not deigning to visit my lungs for longer than a brief hello before rushing away.  Air has gotten heavy, much too heavy for my paper mache lungs, which are threatening to strike and seem only to be working at all anymore out of a much appreciated but very shallow sense of duty.  Air’s omnipresence is the single most maddening aspect of its refusal to engage me.  Every molecule of my skin touches it.  Air taunts me with its proximity to the lungs it refuses to satisfy.  I’m an emaciated beggar seated before a feast into which I do not even have the strength to bite. 

It’s not really air that has the problem, though, and we both know it.  I can no more open my lungs to air than I can spread my arms in flight, but nevertheless, it is somehow me who denies air entry.  My problem is only exacerbated by my attempts to stop being the problem.  I will die of this; of that, I am certain.  Death by asphyxiation.  The withholding of the freely available.