The Po Show

Breathing

I cannot fucking breathe.

I've had a cold from hell since last Friday, thoughfully vectored to me by my darling baby girl. I feel so lame, because I mention to people that I feel terrible and they all say, "Oh, is it the flu?"

"No, just a cold," I answer. But "just a cold" can't convey how shitty I feel, and it makes me feel somehow indignant that the illness I have somehow merits less impact. I mean, people in the Middle Ages DIED from viruses like this (though of course they didn't have nice warm houses and over the counter meds to help them get better, plus there were a gazillion other nasty germies waiting to attack their compromised immune systems).

Anyway, I spent all of last night desperately trying to breathe adequately enough to fall asleep. I tried EVERYTHING, a million positions (not the fun kind!), decongestants, mucus-killers, warm moist air, warm compresses on my sinuses, nasal lavage. I tossed and turned in bed, then on the couch, and watched every single hour pass on the clock. I just can't breathe through my mouth and fall asleep. I just can't fall asleep when I can't breathe.

So I thought about the nature of breath and breathing (you have a lot of time between 10:30 and 6:45 to ponder things). The other day as I was complaining about my inability to breathe, Ross quipped, "Eh, breathing is overrated."

But it's really not. Actually it's pretty freaking important. We take in not just oxygen and assorted other gasses that we need to live, but all sorts of other things in the air we breathe. Some of it is better left unmentioned (and unpondered), like dust mite poop and other microscopic ick.

We breathe in a lot of things, though, and how much of them stay with us? Do molecules of things we've smelled, people we've hugged, places we've been, stay in hidden pockets in our lungs? Do they migrate somehow into our cells? Somewhere, in some crevice in my lung tissue, is there a saved molecule of my dad, dead thirteen and a half years now?

I thought about breath, and my dad, last night. I missed seeing him before he died, by 30 fucking minutes. This is something I will always regret, till the day *I* die. I didn't know his condition was quite so urgent. I was living in Hawaii, and when I was told on a Friday afternoon that he wasn't doing well and I should come home, I waited till I could get on a standby flight the next morning. My father-in-law picked me up at the airport, and we waited f-o-r-e-v-e-r for my luggage to come out. Then he drove like 60 MPH the whole way to Oxnard. If I'd known time was of such import, I would have left my damn luggage and asked my FIL to step on it. But I didn't, and we didn't, and my dad died half an hour before I got there.

I missed being there with him at the end. All of my family was there, and my sister later told me that at the very end, she reached over to kiss him on the cheek. He sighed very deeply, and was still, and she realized that he had exhaled his last breath.

What I wouldn't have given to be there, and breathe in some part of that breath, and hold onto it in some place inside, near my heart. Hold it in, keep it from escaping back out, by the power of breath.