i remember breathing

 I remember a marine biologist telling me on a tour how whales are conscious breathers, how they choose to come up from the surface to breathe in the same way we make the conscious decision to eat so that we don’t starve. I remember the splash of each spout on the horizon invoking a powerful sensation of resilience that I envied. I return to this memory, and it brings me back to conscious breath.

I remember wondering why our body isn't always breathing on autopilot, how it is for most of the day. With the same unconscious care of our smooth muscles contracting and expanding without our mind explicitly spelling out the command. Each organ moving with invisible memory, sleepwalking throughout the night. Wordless whispers are exchanged in the secret language of breath, a slow constant radiation of life feeding the trees empty calories.

The choice is always there, to control my breath, and yet consciousness only finds me when I am suffocating under the weight of choice. This feels like a metaphor for free will in a way, or perhaps the human condition I can’t manage to diagnose.

I remember I am breathing in the silence of the night, when the whistle exhaled from my nasal cavity echoes off my sinus walls, ricocheting against my skull. I count each breath like sheep, each exhale taunting me with white noise reminding me that I am awake. I cannot remember my last breath before I go under the blanket of night, and this too upsets me. How breath blends from choice to compulsion. 

I intimately remember the absence of breath. Life without breath was a paradox I was quite fond of, though I cannot grasp the reason why. I reminisce, holding my breath under pool water, pretending I am dead, a limp jellyfish swaying my limbs beneath my arched back until I could feel the carbon dioxide press heavy against my chest. I counted the seconds until chlorine stung my nose, instinctually inhaling absent air.

I remember learning how to inhale smoke, which was the first time it didn't bother me to consciously breathe. Wrapping my lips around christened glass was the only time I could reach depth in my inhales, sucking in the artificial life force I mistakenly identified as consciousness. I remember drawing chalky breaths from my desert dry mouth sucking in the ghost of my mind’s rest. I inhaled and inhaled until my memory went blank, and I could no longer remember breathing.

I remember when I lost the choice to breathe. When I thought I took my last breath, and no matter how hard I sucked, I sank further and further into suffocation. My chest a popped balloon deflating with each hyperventilating breath attempting to pump life into its rubber. My trachea, a broken straw bent beneath the weight of anxiety, wheezing from my diaphragm. I remember thinking back to the whales, and watching my twisted tail attempt to kick up to the surface for one last breath.    

I recently remembered how to breathe in a room dominated by the stench of sweaty skin. I recall switching to inhaling through my mouth to avoid the olfactory tickle of body odor. My knees bent before me, planted parallel over the soles of my feet where my toes gripped the foam of the mat, and I opened my rib cage to the sky. The pink fluid of my lungs overflowed over the brim of my bones while my belly stretched to its full capacity. I remember sucking in the salt of tears subconsciously rolling down my face for the simple fact that I wanted to remember this breath.