breathing

I have to breath. When I first started to consciously inhale and exhale, it reminded me of a soft walk. After a few blocks you begin to forget you are walking. If you just turn that part of your mind off and concentrate instead on a street sign, the museum of science architecture the girl walking up there, then you don’t notice the decision to walk. But I’ve lost automatic breathing. There are some stretches of obliviousness. Until that ultimate, terrible, panic-striking fact that I have to remember to breath, breaks through my thoughts like a stroke. My muscles tingle. Since my thoughts are stunted, like a stalled train, I have grave difficulty with simple activities like remembering which street leads to the convenient store, remembering to watch for a red light, or where I placed my phone. On top of that I cannot sleep. Let us be honest now, this is giving me a stunted life expectancy. Four, five days maybe. Where are my glasses? Wait, if I stop breathing they’ll come back to me. On my head. This is no way to survive.
I had no reason to drive through Boston on the last leg of my trip. Except to see Naoimi. And doesn’t she have all the luck now, she’s got the winning lottery ticket and could cry for joy! Except that is it, she cannot. The disease has given her permanent indoor voice. She can’t shout, or yell, or scream, only speak in a dull, banal volume only a note above a whisper. While I’m satcheled with brain death and suffocation; and to think, just last night I was having a wonderful dream about the first crush I ever had, a girl with short cropped hair, jewel eyes and a bountiful rack, meeting me on a train here in Boston. My alarm clock broke us up. I wanted to see where we would go next, and I hoped to returned to that dream tonight. I’ll only see her again when I’m dead.