Don’t hold your breath.
Take a deep breath.
Now hold it. Now think of something beautiful. Now don’t. Think of something sad. Something funny. Something calm. Blue. Liquid. Dark. Small.
Something happy. You want it? You really want it? Keep holding that breath. It’s coming. That’s what everyone says. It’s coming and with it all of the former. All the beautiful things. All the sad things. All the funny things. Calm things. Blue things.
Liquid things.
Dark things.
Small.
Small is the size that your lungs must be by now. Keep holding that breath. You know you can. The pressure is definitely not even close to breaking you. But… you don’t even know it, right? Oh no… We never know it. It’s only after the explosion that we figure out it was all falling apart. And what did we do? We stood by, sidelining the thoughts and the confrontations. It’s probable you’re gonna die soon and what our soul remembers is only the deep breath we took right from the start. I’m almost out of breath and look at me. I have one foot inside the hole and the other one inside the hospital. Is this what I always wanted? Hell, it seems only yesterday that I was getting my elementary school’s degree, but of course that’s the last degree I remember getting, I never challenged myself.
I always took the easy way out. I’ll always regret it.
Ok, you can now exhale. I’ll still always regret it.
This story is based on a conversation I had with an old man this past week on the bus. I don’t know his name nor his age but I like to kinda think of him as ‘Juan’, and by the things he told me (he was just coming home from a medical appointment he had that morning, he’s battling umm… was it… early stages of cancer?) he’s around seventy or eighty years old. When people know death is right on their doorstep they see things differently, Juan sincerely wanted to teach me a lesson with whatever he had at that moment. He seemed like a really nice guy and me, well, I’m good with old people. I listen to all the things they want to say because I’ve always thought they were important. Juan knows a lot, I can tell he’s fucked many things in his life. He regrets whatever thing he didn’t want to talk about and hell, he may even regret his entire life. Who are we to judge? Of course the conversation didn’t happen as written above, that’s the way I see it. I see someone who kept holding his breath waiting for it to happen and it never did. Maybe that’s why that old saying goes “don’t hold your breath” when someone is waiting for something.
Don’t hold your breath. Keep living. Don’t hold your breath. Keep failing. Don’t hold your breath. Keep fixing. Don’t hold your breath. Keep thinking.
Don’t hold your breath. Keep going.
