I have a hard time breathing. It's either the asthma or the cigarettes, but maybe it's something to do with the way my chest gets tight when someone says your name, even if they're not talking about you. I can hear the air fighting through my throat on the way in, but even more so on the way out. I get it, because after what I had to go through to get inside of your lungs, I **** well wanted to stay there as long as I could. Every cough and every wheeze reminds me of how close I could be, and how hard you might try to push me out. The way you love me is like breathing; recycled, a struggle, in and out . But everyone ends up in the ground with a silent chest some day, and I am not ready for that funeral yet. The childhood pet meant to teach me to cope with death lived well past his years and still curls up at the end of my bed every night.
When I was a child my mother would read to my brother and I every day, but stop at the cliff hangers. She had to hide the books in the liquor cabinet so we wouldn't read ahead, and that was the first time, but not the last, I found myself sitting on my brother's shoulders, opening those doors in search of escape. Where my lips pressed to the spines of worn paperbacks stolen from the school library, now they wrap around cold bottle rims, or orange filters that promise black air. The way you love me is like coughing up blood. I only imagined it when I woke up shaking in the middle of the night.