Dust
“…it is estimated that the entire outer layer of skin is shed every day or two at a rate of 7 million skin flakes per minute, which corresponds to a mass emission rate of about 20 mg/minute.”
The rain of dust which falls like light snow: so much of it is the skin of you and your loved ones. You breathe this in and out, day after day: in your lifetime pounds of those you care about (and complete strangers and mortal enemies and repairmen and shopwomen) will pass cloud-like into your lungs. We are not substantial enough to cause one another more than a sneeze. We slough off into dust as we live and decompose into dust when we die; but the dust in our house, on our books and our shelves, tells us that we’re dying already, forming a thin layer over everything we own.
When that dust accumulates on the television screen and our family is watching their show, they are watching it through us, through the detritus of our expiring skin. Our children will see everything through us, even after we are gone. But so will many: we will then be the dust in the air and the dirt in the ground, the carbon in the grass and the nitrogen in the sky. It is in dust that you can see where you’ll be, and what it means to precede others through life: it means to fall like ash over the shapes they’ll recognize, the thin, soft layer over the hard contours of their experiences: a sheet over a sleeping body, a fog over a slumbering city.
