Sunday 16 March 2014

Don't Panic

Breathing is something we do from the second we're born to the moment we die. How can something so natural be so difficult?

You feel like you're suffocating, like your lungs are filling with water and you're drowning, like you're in a crowded room screaming for help but nobody can hear you.

Surely something must be wrong for that feeling to control your life, as if you're trapped, scared to talk incase the tears escape. Surely that can't be right?

You say you'll be okay, like you've done a million times before. As if everything is just going to blow over, as if everything is going to be fine.

Then after so long, all those days, months, weeks of being strangled you hear a song, a perfect arrangement of notes, a lullaby to your sadness. And for the first time, you can breathe. You take it in, all the way. In and out. That satisfaction as you hear yourself, breathing for the first time. And in those few minutes, something so simple which seems so impossible almost becomes easy. All your problems and worries fade away with a single breath. Somehow you feel free, like it was all a dream. Like you've woken up to a beautiful reality. Everything almost seems normal.

The song finishes and the breathing stops, you're back to that familiar feeling. Taking gulps of emptiness, hopelessly searching for the cure to your continuous pain.

How can something so peaceful be so exhausting?

1 comment:

  1. You really do take the reader somewhere with you, albeit a small journey, writing is much of that way. You unravelled the string and pinned it periodically to the walls. You lead out and in again, no light required, words enough.

    Maybe there is truly a deeply oxymoronic irony in the tiresome peacefulness we all seek to find or fall upon. That we should strive so hard when it should more over wish itself to fall into our laps on at an unexpected time and occassion. Although it is contested that human nature allow this without a little hesitation. A little curiosity. A little, meddling? We are so messy and mischevious afterall.

    You have really begun with something so good here, it will be an enchanting honour to see where you go.

    Be so wonderfully soft as per normal, I feel very lucky to know you. There will be so many more who follow to say that too, X

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