Vents Open Anyway

Have you ever heard the saying “Be careful who you vent to. Vents lead to other rooms”? 

Like the way air passes effortlessly from person to person. And despite trying your best to contain your thoughts in your brain, keeping that air trapped within a 4-by-4 wall of private, unshared thoughts, the stagnant air and depleting oxygen can cause a mental version of ‘cerebral hypoxia’. The world tells you repeatedly to hold your thoughts to yourself. But while that may make you all the wiser, that kind of paranoia would ultimately cause you to suffocate within an echo chamber of your own creation.

And the vent opens anyway. And by nature, air demands to move.

We were standing in the dark, far off from campus, where lights couldn’t reach, the cold bit into our skin, and the trees shrouded all around us and reached up to the stars, shutting us into a dark, suffocating canopy. Twigs and pinecones poked our legs where we sat, and the damp dirt and grass stained our hands and pants. 

My friend broke down in my arms, saying “What do I do?” Shaking, eyes down, hands clasped. His lips pursed, quivered, and unpursed, as though slipping even a syllable of what he did would cause irreparable harm. Catastrophic, like letting air into one of those heavy industrial agricultural control rooms, where oxygen has to be artificially starved to prevent the fresh fruit from rotting. 

My friends are precious to me. Throughout my life, they were a safe space to go to when I was vulnerable. They were places to fall back on when I had nowhere to go. I had always felt a bitter jealousy when I saw others who had their family and others to fall back on. Rooms with so much structural integrity, that even the strongest gusts of wind could flow back and forth and nothing would collapse. 

In contrast, my rooms felt fragile. I felt that my own truths wouldn’t be tolerated the same way others were. Trapped within a cycle of abuse, my rooms housed black and blue bruises that stretched under winter layers. It was as though I needed to take breath mints before speaking to someone so they couldn’t get a whiff of my malodorous thoughts and intentions. Or that I would spray the air with Febreze to mask the rotting stench of my true feelings.

He thought that him speaking now was a truth I didn’t know. But the truth was that the air had already been let in. 

Explosive truths, like waves of oxygen in hypoxic fire prevention rooms, had already sparked. Watching him try to navigate campus as though his hands were clean, the phantom of his actions haunted me. My rage spilled over and burned the fruits to crisps. Dissipating and smoking: my true feelings clouded my vision, making my room heavy and thick with ash and smog. Within the heat of my anger, I had also become a vent, ensuring that everyone else in our circle could feel the burning. 

Do you know the symptoms of hypoxia? 

It’s strange. You may not realize it at first, but your brain can feel its effects within minutes or hours, before you even realize something is wrong. A throbbing headache. Apathy. Sluggish responsiveness. Poor decision-making. Insidious cognitive impairment. It’s a terrible way to suffer; not even knowing what is causing all these problems. I think maybe that was what was happening to me. 

Watching him weep was confusing. I had carried the cold, hard truth for him for as long as I could, but now that he was finally trying to put it into words, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to hear it. Seeing his lips quiver as he struggled and failed over and over to confess the unforgivable: his betrayal of friendships and abandonment of responsibility. 

The air had been let in. It had already run its course. The fruits of our years of friendship, sitting there in a carefully controlled and preserved room. Memories that we had created: late night study sessions, campus walks, and terrible on campus housing. The narratives of who we were, our closeness, and difficult transition to adulthood. The produce that we had cultivated throughout the course of college, that had sat safe and dark in that careful pristine environment, was ruined.

We held each other for a while. 

I hated the fact that I knew.

I hated that he knew that I knew.

We didn’t beg. We never admitted guilt. We never said what we wanted to say, or what we should have said. As his chest heaved, and my breathing shallowed, the condensation trailed in the frigid dark of the night. His secrets, or our secrets, settled in the air, warping and distorting not only our relationship, but the world around us.

Could his remorse be evidence that he could be redeemed? Could his admission of guilt lead to him being exonerated? Could we rebuild our friendship over the ashes of what once was?

I couldn’t do it: what was done was done, and what was said was said. The way lung damage in firefighters is irreversible, asbestos cannot be removed from the body, and fumes can cause deep lung tissue scarring, it was too late to save anything now. When mold spores settle into the walls, the only way to fix it is to tear out the rot from the roots. When roaches make home in the pipes, the only real way to exterminate them is to move to a fresher, cleaner, and newer environment. 

We had no confrontation. No accusation. There was no deciding moment. But having taken its course, we both chose to flee from the responsibility, and let the mold and roaches of resentment fester and rot our once precious friendship.

Sometimes, I wonder what happened to him, if he truly changed. I wonder if he ever truly got to confess, let his hurricane of truth flush out his room, wipe him clean, and give him a new base to start building his relationships anew. I wonder if the relief saved him. I wonder if my inability to be straight to his face changed how he felt about what had happened. 

I felt more alone than I had in a while. 

As I stepped out reluctantly from the dark and windowless airtight room, and breathed in the open woods, I was clean from the damp mustiness of my own room.

And strangely, I felt more content with being alone than I ever had before.