The Weight of a Breath

CW: Domestic abuse, substance abuse

When your head hit the floor, I could have sworn you were staring right at me. Your eyes were too wide, unflinching, staring straight into my—

Could the veil have thinned? Have I become known again for the first time in—

You blinked and your gaze shifted back. To him. Standing above you, the air echoing profanities louder than the thunder clamoring outside. His face was red from screaming, heaving, hissing with unfiltered rage. Bits of his spit splattered onto you, as you lay trembling on the splintered wooden floor.

His hand slapped across your face, leaving your already bruised cheek flushed even redder. Your body seized up. That was the fourth time he has struck you tonight. The twelfth this week. A faint sound- a sob perhaps–escaped you. I could barely hear it. You tried to cover your face as he stumbled around the room, muttering to himself in an intoxicated haze. 

I could have cried for you. If I still had a body that held tears. I could almost feel it. A twinge of…something. Stinging my chest. It ignited within me, a faint ache, then dissipated a moment later. A candle flame snuffed out with a quick breath. Right where my heart had been. 

You had asked him why he came home so late. Two days ago you had not cooked the dinner that he wanted. Last week you had refused to go to bed with him.

This house had never been filled with such tension. It was so thick, so real, that even I could almost see it hanging in the air. You tensed up whenever he was near. The tiniest tremble took over your hands whenever he tried to hold your waist, kiss on your neck. The way your breaths quickened when you knew he would be returning soon. Your clammy hands straightening out your dress as you stare at yourself in the mirror for too long. I think you try to smile. It holds for a mere second, no more, then fades away. 

I am standing behind you. The mirror can’t see me and neither can you. The edges of my form fizzled out, clipped out of the realm that you live in. The universe never allowed anyone made of real matter to witness my existence. 

Who am I if no one actually sees me?

I had asked myself that same question when air could still reach the bottom of my lungs. A hundred years ago. Or however long it had been since my last real breath. My last breath which I had taken in the same bedroom that you sleep in each night. 

Even as you sleep, you still look tense. Stiff as you lay next to your husband while he snores impossibly loud. Everything he does is loud. The expectation of him, of his rage, looms over the house. The second when the switch flips to anger. It hangs heavy. It lingers in the hallway, in the corner of every room, watching from the foot of the bed. It’s the shadows in your vision that make your heart jump.

I had believed I was meant to haunt this home. The reason I am not able to leave. To ascend from this creaky, withering house. 

The front door had almost ripped off its hinges when he barged through on the day you moved in. I remember the glimmer in your eyes. You were so alive. Alive with hope and a soul that was sunbathing in the million open doors that being alive brings.

How exciting. 

You buzzed around the kitchen, danced through the hallways, and kissed your husband as if the sun was shining for the first time in a hundred years. 

Until the first argument. The slow, gradual switch in his actions. His mood, the time it took for his temper to snap. The first time his knuckles hit you so hard you fell to the ground. You looked at him with those big puppy dog eyes. His presence loomed over you. The brightness that lived in your soul was sucked into the black hole he created. The life taken from your eyes. The glimmer had shattered and it has not returned since. Your voice had quieted. Your gaze towards him softened. 

It was troubling. Upsetting. Of course it was. These feelings never stayed with me for long. There was no place for them to hold, to grasp on to, to settle for long enough for me to feel their weight. I stood on the other side of a one way mirror, observing. All I could do was watch. Watch your suffering. Behind closed doors, doors that passed through me with ease. Such personal, primal, raw emotions escaping your body with violent sobs as you sit on the bathroom floor, crying for the last two hours. 

A blossoming in my chest. It was small - as if a seed has just grown its first root. It stung. It buzzed. It stayed somewhere deep inside me, as a quiet ache that just simply persisted. I waited. Waited for the moment that it would leak from me, slipping through my fingers, dissolving into the night. To sense a thing gave me unease.

I have not felt anything in my body since the illness that gave me coughs. Violent coughs that tore through my lungs. Nineteen, far too young, everyone had whispered around me as I stared at the ceiling, sick with breaths that were slowly killing me. Something within me, something full of stupid hope, wanted to look down and see that this buzz had turned into a chest that heaved up and down. The way yours did now, through thick sobs, as you heard the jingle of keys open the front door. 

Maybe he would go to bed, drift asleep on the couch, as he did some nights. And leave you alone. But not tonight. 

The anger followed him inside, slamming the door. He had already decided he was mad. Something about work. About a dumb coworker, money lost in a bet. How is that your fault? Words came out slurred, jumbled from his mouth. His breath smelled of—-

Alcohol?

Hm.

I couldn’t bear to watch. I had always wanted to lunge forward. Strike him. Strangle him. Push him off of you. Look into his eyes and watch him stare back, terrified, at the ghost in front of him. But what can a hand that does not exist to the real world do?

But after this many times–-this many sobs, tears, screams, all at the hands of a man with the capacity to feel anything, yet chooses hatred. 

He unbuckles his belt. 

The root, the buzz in my chest seeps outward. It grows. Spreading, leaking, filling gaps, sewing through the emptiness, piecing together something I didn't know had ripped apart. It feels like—

Nerves. Alive in my hands. In my lungs. I can almost feel the ghost of my heart beating behind my chest. It’s as if air is filling my lungs, it holds within me, all of it, weighing down, heavy against my soul—

You stare at me. Your face is pale, your eyes frozen wide. Your breath is so quiet that I can’t hear it. 

He stares too. Eyes boring into me, to the corner of the room where I stand. 

In one quick motion, you scramble to your husband. Hide behind him, cowering. He puffs his chest, as if he were a soldier protecting a weak girl. 

After all that? You go running back to him?

Your eyes peer over his shoulder. 

The tiniest hint of a glimmer looks back at me, in the same moment the weight of air finally reaches me.