The Atlantic
“‘Breathe life in,’ the Vicks website exhorts me, and I do: microbes, pollen, skin mites, spit, gnats, fumes, gas leaks, street nuts, farts. I exhale bits of me into the air; I inhale bits of everything else. Even while those things enter, lodge in, or even bind to me, Vicks makes me less aware of the mingling, the breakdown of boundaries–as unaware as I am of the constant multiplying or destruction of my own cells, and as personally involved. I’m huffing Vicks and feeling none of it; I am virtually veneered; I am dissolving and rebuilding myself in the world.”
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