In the quiet hour before dawn, when the wind still holds the scent of night and the earth waits between one heartbeat and the next, the old monk sat by the river. His breath rose and fell like the tide — slow, deliberate, knowing.
A boy came to him, eyes bright with questions too large for his small frame.
“Master,” he said, “why do people die?”
The old monk smiled, gazing at the mist curling above the water. “Because they must return their breath.”
The boy frowned. “Return it? To whom?”
“To where it came from,” said the monk. “Everything that breathes borrows the same wind. The deer in the forest, the fish beneath the river, the king in his palace, the beggar by the gate — all draw from the same invisible sea.”
He scooped a handful of water, then let it slip through his fingers. “When your time comes, you give it back. That is all death is — the moment your breath returns home.”
The boy thought about this as the years unfurled like a long road. He grew, loved, fought, built, and aged. Each breath carried laughter and sorrow alike, each exhale a whisper to the universe. He watched others take their last breaths — a dying bird, a fading friend, his mother — and he began to notice something: the air never grew thinner.
It was as if every breath ever taken still lingered — mingled, shared, alive.
When his own final hour came, he remembered the monk’s words. The air around him shimmered with the faint warmth of every creature that had ever lived. He smiled.
He exhaled once more, and this time, he didn’t draw another in. His last breath drifted away, unseen, to join the great current — the same one that would fill a newborn’s lungs, stir the wings of a sparrow, and ripple the surface of the sleeping river.
And so it went, as it always had.
All living things die of the same thing — their last breath — yet in dying, they return it to life itself.
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