Inhale, Exhale

A piece for my friend Kat — thank you for loving, as you do.

To breathe would seem a simple thing, but sometimes it isn’t. One could argue the same is true of being human, making friends… falling in love. To breathe in is to inspire; to inspire the air of those we love must be a kind of inspiration. And then there is the exhale, the aspiration. If you’re reading this piece aloud, the cadence and speed at which you speak are determined by the breadth of each lung, their catch of air, bellows that cool the space around the heart, which, so often, beats in heated bursts.

I’d been in love before, perhaps with some pride at the time, rolling the syllables of “iloveyou” around in my mouth, a sentence severely languid and unmeasurable. At least, at the time. To love someone new was bigger than I could understand, but I knew an end was likely guaranteed, and I knew the end would hurt.

How do you measure kinder kinds of love? Are they soft around the edges, full of late-night pasta, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks? Would we think, oh! the beautiful mess of our lives! Was it showing up unannounced to our cramped, too-expensive apartments? Something measured in laughs and breaths? I imagined, in its simplest form, that it came as a kind of relief in being known.

I’d soak in other people’s stories, gathering still frames like petals, stitching together their gossamer fine and far too fragile, into something that might hold. And in this way, I would continue, beading and bestowing, lines in bright and crooked thread, open at the seam. By the end, my fingertips were raw from the detailing, because there would be so many details I’d never want to forget.

She was painting a candle, long blonde hair slung over one shoulder, her fingers ringed with thready gold. A flash of light blue eyes — never cold. More like delphiniums, or the morning sky before it’s sun-stained. She held a brush in one hand, miming with the other. To the wax, small focused strokes, leaves and flowers forming in their wake, despite the flow of conversation. I felt my breath catch upon a thrum of hope: she’d be my friend. Inhale. Exhale.

My hope remained.

I couldn’t imagine from lakeside walks on a heady October afternoon, to finding ourselves on another planet alongside high schoolers in ill-fitting cowboy boots, singing the loudest to a song about sun-faded armchairs, sloppy $20 hot dogs from a cart on the side of the road, and so much easy laughter — how gentle this kind of love would be. In a too-bright Taco Bell, the first of many careful unspoolings, as if to say, here, look past my ribs, I am not my hardest parts, nor the scars that I have learned to live with. I took her thread, carefully, between my thumb and forefinger, and tied it to the space between my first and second ribs. How stories can stretch between two people, both lightening and deepening, giving each one more room to breathe. And then it was my turn. The thread held.

She remains.

Somewhere between one year and two, life without stopped being imaginable. I can no longer measure this kind of love in breaths, because I’m no longer counting them. Instead, I measure salty, stinging wipeouts in the surf beneath a vibrant sky, in late-night check-ins and morning coffee walks, knowing how to read another human from all the way across a room, maybe even farther with my glasses firmly on. I began to understand that love is rarely the biggest heartaches or breaks; those just harden your ribs, in some ways, which you may need. It’s the soft bits underneath that inspire and aspire, thrumming when you find someone with whom you can sit in total silence, or rush to hug, soaking wet, heart beating.

It’s a deep breath. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

Inhale. Exhale.