The Ghost of a Breath

The smell of burnt cedar always pulls me back to a winter kitchen, where the air was thick with the ghost of a dying fire. It is a sharp, dry scent that coats the back of the throat, tasting of charcoal and cold stone. I remember the way the heat would ripple above the embers, a silent, twisting language that seemed to have no beginning and no end. It was not a solid thing you could hold; it was a surrender. We spend so much of our lives trying to grasp the permanent, the heavy, the things that stay put in our palms. But there is a strange, hollow comfort in watching something unravel, in seeing a shape form only to dissolve into the nothingness of the room. It is the body’s way of learning to let go, to breathe out what we no longer need to carry. If we could learn to move like that, without resistance, would we finally feel light enough to drift?

Joaquín Alonso Arellano Ramírez has captured this feeling in his work titled Dancing. The way the lines twist and fold reminds me of that same silent, curling heat I once knew. Does this movement stir any forgotten memories in your own skin?