I came in through a gap in the sliding door somebody forgot to seal, and found forty of them lying flat on colored mats, breathing on purpose. Slowly. In through the nose, they were told, and I went in with it, tasted the inside of a woman who ate mango on a plane two days ago, carried it back out, set it down over someone else.
They didn't notice. They were busy being still. So still. Palms up, eyes shut, a whole room of soft creatures deciding, all at once, to stop.
I don't understand stopping. But I love what stopping does to them: I lifted the hair off the back of a man's neck and he shivered like I'd said his name, and I hadn't, I don't have names, I just passed. On the wall a bell hung waiting. I rang it going by. A candle two rooms over I put out without meaning to, and somewhere a bare foot chased a curtain I'd already left.
They keep saying let go. They say it and stay exactly where they are, on their mats, in their walls, in the little wooden building they paid to sit inside and learn releasing. I could tell them. Letting go is the only thing I've ever done. It smells like eucalyptus and warm skin and it lasts exactly as long as it takes to cross a room.
I took a breath from the woman by the window, the deep one she was so proud of, and I was already three valleys east before she finished it, carrying the salt off her cheek to a field she'll never see, having kept, as always, nothing at all.