You take breathing for granted until you have acute bronchitis and chronic asthma, as I had as a child, and you can't breathe, of course. Until you can no longer draw life into your lungs and you have to fight and focus, with all of your might and concentration, on every single breath. In full knowledge that your lungs are slowly filling with fluid, once more, and that you're going to have to wake your sister up from her slumber all over again. When all that you want to do is to let her sleep, so I would lay there in the dark pondering the complexities of my mortality, a child of the night, whose sole purpose was to breathe.

We're all made somewhere off in the past, though, aren’t we? My father, sisters, and me - all of us who all lived in that house. All of us still pretending to be works in progress, no matter how far we've come in life. All yearning and striving to have enough time left to live the lives we are still in search of. To have just one more chance and just one more day, give me one more day we think. As our search never ends. All this time knowing that we are only alive because our ancestors also fought just one more day, shackled as they were in ships, or toiling in the heat of the sun of Jamaica.

We are all the products of the past.

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