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In one day, the average person takes around twenty thousand breaths. A breath is a physiological universal, automatic and controllable - subjective, technique based, and contextual. Breath is as much a fundamental part of life as to how we interact with the world, others, our environment. Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity - so many sects across the world merge breathing with spiritually - Chinese characters symbolically reduce breath into a fundamental radical, our speech punctuated by pauses and breaths like a tonal overture changing context.
But, is our language rich enough to describe breathlessness? The fatigue, the slow build of mucous, how much she was able to grasp, moment by moment, her thoughts on the tire of her chest. The way patients describe, even express, breathlessness differs between country to country - their words shaped by education, poverty, experience; culture. The word fails, as so many words do, to capture the complete shape of the condition.
Scientifically, he could have described her as experiencing ‘hyperpnea’ when she was tired or ‘dyspnoea’ after anything that could be considered even mild exercise - he could try and capture her condition as ‘hyperventilation’ or ‘chronic respiratory failure’ - but what emotions did those words spring to mind? A coldness, hospital beds and plastic doctors. She was so much more than that, so so much more than that.
So why not metaphor? The similes she herself so often employed when they asked her - when they could ask her, how she was feeling. “My lungs are like ground glass”, “Oh, it’s like there’s not enough air in the air”, “It’s like a heavy weight on my chest, like someone’s holding me down and they won’t let me back up”, “I’m drowning, it’s like I’m drowning, but it burns, oh my god. Why won’t it stop fucking burning?!”
She couldn’t ever say, no matter how many scales they gave her, what her level of breathlessness was like. And she’d whisper to him that the nurses didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to know the thick description - they wanted to reduce her to an ink mark number on a page, an experience calculated.
Is our language rich enough to properly describe, give justice to the way she clung to her throat? Her eyes like saucers, her mouth sloppy and drooping. The coughing, the shaking, the long thin croaking line of a gasp that sounded like her chest was coming undone like foundations of a house. The squeal of a rusty door, as if her throat was too dry, her lungs a motionless desert. But no matter how long he stared at her, each breath laboured and shaky and fragile, he couldn’t fully understand it. What it was like, what that sensation of drowning and that seemingly unstoppable ‘fucking burning’ was really like.
He wished he knew. Ahh, as though knowing alone could give him some kind of control over it, as though knowing would make the observing somehow easier. He couldn’t give her his lungs. Even if he held his head under the bathwater until he came up bubbles and chokes, even if he ran and ran and ran in those endless circles around the hospital park - gasping for air while legs ached, even if he… well. Even if he tied a belt round his neck and pulled it until the world stilled, touching the horrid left-over marks with satisfied horror - no matter how he simulated her experience, it was all voluntary. With strong lungs. With an obvious end, a recovery point of minutes. In truth, all he could do was watch.
Watch twenty thousand breaths, quietly passing, unnoticeable without conscious effort. And yet, as she told him on a particularly bad day, you can’t stop it. You can try. You can hold it still, trap one fistful of air for as long as you want - but your body will override your consciousness and force it out anyway. Even if it has to shut down your brain, like a little emergency backup just in case the ape controlling it does anything stupid. Interesting, right?
Twenty thousand breaths, and she’d been made aware of every one.
“I’m breathless”, she’d say - tired from walking and taking a gasp from her inhaler. “I’m breathless”, she’d choke, throwing him the phone, collapsing onto the wall. “I’m breathless”, she’d croaked, gold eyes bleary and hardly open, the oxygen mask slipped from her face.
That wasn’t, couldn’t have been, the same breathlessness he felt when they told her she was dead.
Her breathlessness had been a struggle, a desperation, a notice of the absence. Even when she’d become just a vomit of tubes and the machine pumped air into her and ‘breathless’ took a new meaning - his own breathlessness was something wholly different. It was like he’d never be aware of his breathing again. An emptiness that was sucked from his mouth like the catheters that took away her useless waste.
The rope round his neck was choking him. It was too tight, tighter than the mask on his face. He couldn’t feel his body, sounds distorting, the ruffle of clothes and the snap of the whip seeming wholly separate from the world inside of him. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t cry out, he couldn’t even laugh. This was it, suspended and helpless, this was what she must have felt. The weight on his chest pushing the glass in deeper, the scratches coating his lungs over and over rapid slices red in his vision and a burning, an agonising burning like the stove touching the stove the hot hot hot sun blistering i want this but please breathe breathe breathe breathe please breathe -
His consciousness overridden, the stupid ape put to sleep.
--
Historically, make up had been used throughout the deep well of human culture - precisely when it started long lost to that faraway darkness. The Chinese stained their fingernails with beeswax and eggwax, Persians with their precious kohl smeared along the edges of their eyelids, Geisha crushing safflower petals to rub on their eyebrows and rice powder for her face, European church leaders calling makeup sinful but thousands of woman still doing so. A precedent so long it could almost be called natural.
There’s many reasons why makeup is thought to be worn, to attract a mate, a symbol of status, ceremony or event.
She wore it so she didn’t look sick.
He remembered her long rants, fourteen and bold - makeup was a stupid leftover of a more primitive society. A capitalist evil forcing women into societal anxiety so that they might offer their money and their time on poisonous trite. It dulled them, she said, even if the goal was to make them sparkle.
But then her cheeks hollowed, her eyes sunk, her complexion sallowed - and suddenly her face was forever coated in fine powder, her lips a blaring red. He hadn’t liked it at first, but on reflection, he couldn’t help but wonder if she in part wore it for him. To distract from her sickness, so he wouldn’t notice… that her cheeks didn’t stop getting hollower, her eyes didn’t stop sinking, her complexion sallower. It was like she suspended her appearance under that mask, like she needed it to face the world.
Funny, she wore it so proudly - but it was just another way for her to hide. You could say she wanted to be noticed, but in reality - she just wanted to be thought of as ordinary. He touched his face, ran his fingers over the warm material over his neck - you could say too, that he wore his own (rather more literal) mask for attention. Kekeke, and you’d be wrong. Though he supposed he didn’t want to be thought of as ordinary, either - as flexible and fluid as that term was, anyway.
…
He used her foundation, the sensation of applying it not unpleasant. He put on her lipstick, Cherry Lush or other somesuch fanciful name. He painted his eyes, such a thin line of black eyeliner - until, yes, yes - yes! There she was! Smiling back at him, her perfect face, her mask and her memories, her soft lips opening to thank him for the job well done. Thank you, thank you, thank you Korekiyo. You’re getting better at this, Korekiyo. You’re making me so, (sosoososo) happy.
He slipped his own mask back over, and for a moment, saw her in the mirror with her oxygen mask. The sound of his breathing filled the room, and he embraced himself, thankful that she’d never ever ever ever have to wear that awful mask again.
She finally had his lungs.