He is breathing. His nostrils’ diameters are increasing and decreasing along with his shallow inhalations and labored exhalations. He is sitting in a room that was built by someone else a long time ago, in a house that was built by still another person. This house is located in a country, which in turn is located on this planet. Each country on this planet is made up of people whose nostril diameters are fluctuating constantly. The ones whose nostrils remain still are either burned up or put in the ground.
His body is processing the food he ate last night, and will soon complain about the fact that he’s neglected to consume more food in a timely manner. But his heart is undeterred, and pumps more oxygenated blood through his body without confirmation of more fuel-food to come.
He is alive at this moment, but just a few decades prior he was not. He doesn’t know where he was before he was alive, or where he’ll go when he stops being alive, and no one else on the planet knows either. A few of the top minds are working on solving that problem, but it doesn’t look promising.
Every part of his body is changing right now, as is everything else around him. In a short span of time, he and everything around him will be very different.
His heart beats and pumps oxygenated blood through his body at a faster or slower rate depending on what’s going on inside of his mind. This temporarily varied rate of speed doesn’t affect his body in the short term, but in the long term it will.
The planet he is on is turning very quickly in its orbit around the sun that gives it life. If it stopped making this regular orbit, he would no longer be alive, and the individual components that make up his body would be transmuted into something else.
There is an itch on his nose, which is part of a sense organ on his face. If he scratches the location of his nose that the sensation insists itches, then the sensation will go away.
Thinking about the various possibilities that might befall him after he eventually stops living bothers him sometimes, which makes it difficult for his mind to concentrate on completing tasks that will contribute to the homeostasis that his body requires.
He notices that by simply focusing on the rhythmic changes in his nostril diameter and breath intake, he can stop noticing every irrelevant thing going on around him and just be.
He is taking a deep breath, from his diaphragm.
He is alive.
Liza Olson 