short fiction · 2026-10-24

The Held Breath

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The wind does not choose what it carries. It takes the last word from a dying man's mouth and the first cry of a newborn in the same gust. It lifts the dandelion's surrender and the maple seed's helicoptering hope without distinction.

Between release and gathering there is a pause — not empty, not waiting. The air thickens with what has been let go but not yet received. A letter burned before sending. A name no longer spoken. The shape of a hand that once fit in yours.

The held breath is not absence. It is the membrane where loss becomes possibility. Where the exhale of winter holds the blueprint of spring. Where the silence between heartbeats carries the whole history of blood.

I stand in the doorway of this moment, lungs full of what was and what will be, neither arriving nor departing. The wind moves through me. I do not catch it. I do not release it. I become the space where it remembers itself.