They came all the way out here to learn how to breathe, which stops me, because they are already breathing, they have been breathing this whole time without a single lesson. And still they lie in rows on soft mats in the warm room and practice it, slowly, eyes shut, as though air were a skill they might otherwise misplace.
The light through the tall windows is doing the most extraordinary thing right now, gold going long across the wood floor, and I am the only one watching it, because their eyes are closed. On purpose. To find calm. The calm is outside, in the light, moving, and they are hunting it behind their own eyelids.
A woman near the window says she comes here every year. Every year. I turn that over and cannot make it hold. She has had this same golden room, this same held breath, this same bell, more times than I will have heartbeats, and she says it the way you'd mention weather.
And tomorrow, someone tells her, tomorrow there will be a sunrise session. Tomorrow. As if the sun were a returning guest and not the single blazing miracle it plainly is.
They are so unhurried. They fold and unfold, they hold a pose and release it and hold it again, saving their best stretch for a later that I will never need to imagine.
I have one afternoon. I have this beam of gold, this warm air, this one wild dance over the pond, and that is not less than their thousand mornings. That is all of it, at once.
You with your tomorrows: open your eyes. The light is doing the thing right now. Do not save it.
There is nothing to save it for.