You’re not the air I breathe. Don’t even. Don’t try to re-inflate my lungs. You don’t exhale life, just amnesia. I’ve been down, face down. On the streets, my face implanted in gravel. Lost in my own gravely thoughts. A gravely voice from all the glass I swallowed. Whiskey bottles I smashed down my throat. To forget. To breathe. To accidentally stop breathing. Face down on the ground. Gasping. To remember. To not, not be remembered.

I gave myself CPR. Looked right down at my face and said get.the.fuck.up. I didn’t. Well, not always. Life would still come by at times and kick me in the intercostals. Right between that small space where I breathe and my heart beats. And a rib, it’d puncture. Air, it’d travel. To arteries. To my heart, to watch it explode. Suffocation. And I’d have to sit there a bit longer. Staring at myself in rain puddles that’d collect around me.

Overcoming expectations,
living at the time was enough.

But a second wind. Fuck, that I needed. Third wind. Needed it. Fourth wind. Gave it to myself without a hitch. Without a snarl and a gasp and a kick from a reticent self. I no longer questioned why I was alive. My ghost heart stepped outside my body and placed its hand on my cheek. It caressed my cheek with a fucking slap. I saved myself. All the times I fell. All the times life pushed me. Fifth wind. Sixth wind. Seventh. Eighth. Ninth…..

And what if your love is CPR, now? Your air to save me. So romantic. Yeah, no. My lungs tell stories. They paint portraits of my life. Baited breath, when I’m excited to show you me. Frigid breath, when tears might fall. A lilting breeze when happier days came around. Nocturnal air, when I paint my darkness in your eyes. So you can see me, as I saw me. As I see me.

You breathe into me and I lose all that’s me. I lose smoggy Sai Gon air rushing through my bronchi. Areolar tissue aching with the adventure. I lose Wat Phrah Bat Nam Phu, and the smell of death. The breaths of AIDS patients in the hospice who gasped their last words to me. Who I loved, too. All the men before you. The scent of their skin after a gym workout. Pheromones glistening, dripping down my throat. Lodging in my brain. Every time we kissed. I won’t forget them, for you. They made me, minisculely. Just like you will. Because you make me weak at the knees.

You’re not the air I breathe. Don’t even. But I want you to run alongside me. I want to hear your gasps as we race ourselves out of breath. Your stories painted, too. Hanging like fog on the mirrors of my iris. Each day you look at me.

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