From her mat on the floor she could see the stars fading through the window. Her eye lids barely fluttered. Her body was failing her. She had coaxed it for 50 years to be the bee of the house. She had rarely stepped outside the walls of the home. She thought of her blind mother-in-law, her brother-in-law who ran the home after her husband’s death, and the goodies she had to make for her grandson’s seventh birthday. She gulped air in painful gasps. Her finger tips felt numb and cold. Her muscles didn’t betray a twitch. Her body had always been beautiful. A curtain of thick dark hair that hung down her waist was yet to sprout a gray strand. Her parents loved her fish-like eyes. But, it was the melody in her voice that her husband loved the most. Her niece and daughter loved the way her body moved as she worked. Now, she lay alone, unable to bat an eyelid. What is the use of this body? She thought. It seems with every breath I renew my attachment to this body and the life I built around it. If I don’t breathe, If I don’t work, I am not who I am. If I don’t walk around in this body I am nobody. No one would own a being without a body. Of what use was it to them? Her breathing grew as painful as life. It seared her nostrils, burned her throat and set her lungs aflame. So much violence in a natural act, she thought. So many muscles throbbed in synchrony to support and fulfill the promise of a single breath. So much energy was required to live and on this short burst of renewed lease that came with each breath. My life hangs on the faint hope that I will breathe again. My life, like my birth, is a breath away she thought. She was burning, yet freezing, beyond shivering. Her bones, muscles, sensations, heartbeat, breath, melted in the heat and numbed by the cold. She was not the body. She was nothing. She was simply a borrower of life with a strange renewal date. Every breath, every heart beat was a renewal. Everybody who shared their time with her were like her, on their strange, individual journey. Would the next breath revive her body or suck her into another journey. Did she have a choice?