Decorum goes out the window quick when you can’t breathe.
You give a startled cough, and a second follows almost immediately when you try to take a deep inhale. Your body reacts as though you’d tried to siphon smoke from a volcano.
You were headed home from a party together; wandering through campus on a crisp autumn night. He can’t see you like this. Even if it means crawling the rest of the way to your dorm.
Panic makes the coughing worse, which makes the panic worse. You try your best not to spin out into infinity, but it’s compoundingly unavoidable.
You’re a snowball, rolling down a hill. Oh, no you aren’t, you’re just starting to pass out. You need to slow your breathing if you have any chance of preventing a full-blown asthma attack.
You hold onto a gangly tree for support; slowly sinking down against it as carefully as possible. He refuses to leave; asks what you need.
What do you need? You need him to stop looking at you; need him to stop seeing you suffocating to death so humiliatingly in front of him.
But you can’t tell him that, because someone has shoved a shop vac into your lungs and is sucking out all of your oxygen out like they’re those storage bags for comforters.
He sees you struggling to regulate your breathing and puts his hand on your shoulder. Takes a slow, exaggerated breath in through his nose. Show off.
Still, the corners of your consciousness are getting fuzzy, so what the hell? As slowly as possible, you begin as deep an inhale as you dare.
In. Cough. Out. In. Cough. Out.
You’re so fucking tired of this shit. Your lungs have held you hostage all your life, keeping you from sports and outdoor adventures.
That doesn’t mean you haven’t tried. Since you started running in high school, you’ve steadily grown stronger and more athletic. You lift weights regularly and will one day discover a love of climbing that will take your breath away in a new way.
These things can reduce the asthma attacks, but don’t prevent them completely. Allergies and cold weather make them so much worse; hence this latest humiliation.
You breathe in tandem with him until the attack begins to wane. Your breathing is still ragged and wheezy, but you’d caught it early enough that you were able to avoid a more serious attack.
The coughing begins to feel less like breathing through a coffee straw and more like you’ve finally broken the surface of a choppy lake. You fight to keep your breath slow, lest you trigger more coughing, as you greedily fill your lungs with the sweet oxygen it’d been starved of.
As if it hadn’t been all around you. As if it wasn’t your body itself keeping it from you.
You wipe the tears that have leaked into the corners of your eyes.
He slips his hand into yours. Your heart races, but not in the life-threatening way.
