Is it me? or is it the pressure that comes from holding it in? the pressure of trying to be a better me, of carrying the workload of school and leading a pack of my own flesh and blood. I guess the one difference between people like me and asthma patients is the fact that they actually struggle to breathe during a crisis, and I try to comfort myself with it. I can hold this breath for 49 seconds. I’m trying so hard to break a record. I was once told the trick was staying calm enough to forget the pain. Something about blood I think? Lungs concave in birth, Peeling and dry, and heaving in agony. Like smoke, inflating themselves, Latex chests in gallons of oils; gasping, grabbing, and lingering breath to push out plethora of putrid gas in the evil air. Something about keeping it all in your chest so you don’t have to face hearing the pound. I’ve held this breath for the past years. I’m trying not to break others. In their eyes a girl like me is a dandelion, pretty and white and easy to push off a cliff. Something about courage. Something about the day I had to level up. Is this why most people’s lives have Asthma? So I can make a record of the respiratory failures I’ve caused, Something about lungs made of iron and bullet proof breaths and PTSD attacks and irony entrusting in rib cages, so I can make and pretend that I’m decongesting instead of dying, Instead of dry powder inhaling this drunken death. I was wondering what I did wrong. Why can’t I hold as much as they do? Why my capacity to take in only spans my trachea, not knowing when to let go and exhale because no one was there to teach me to breath, lying down in that dark basement of guilt and self-denial because no one taught me to breathe, coughing up broken heads, and stabbed souls. I couldn’t breathe, I only knew how to copy it. I can hold a family trauma for only so long. Something about blood I think, and staying calm enough to forget the pain; and holding my breath, as it is the closest I can feel to dying before I back out and exhale again. Sometimes I’m afraid to speak, I am told that air can make shadows and every time I write my expressions, I cast into a life I’m sure I don’t know how to live. I can hold my breath for 49 seconds, or maybe *for the rest of my life*, But instead I breathe out again. Force it! Maybe there is truth in taking a breath, enclosing the rib cage because it holds in a thousand breaths I’ll never get to exhale; ones that I never got to have, ones my childhood never got to have. And I’m sick of black pain. I want to know how long I can hold it for them. Let me atlas their asthma attack away. Let me hold my breath, I’m trying to break a legacy of lost dreams and souls, I’m trying to break down a system built over my neck, I’m still trying to breathe under the choking pressure. “And, I will.
Victory Chinyerem
