Breathe... Dammit!

     To be alive has two meanings, in my book. We are all alive in the sense of the word. We breathe in oxygen and release carbon dioxide. Our hearts --the involuntary cardiovascular muscle that symbolizes so much more than the pumping of blood and oxygen—beat without so much as a single thought. These actions are compulsory; they require no thought or even desire to be completed. Our bodies are alive with the breath of life so obligatory in nature that the choice to breathe, the choice to pump blood to every capillary in your tenement, is not even really a choice at all. One can only hold their breath for so long before your intellectual makeup as a mammal screams, “BREATHE DAMMIT!” Being alive in the simplest nature is instinctual, but being alive outside of the carnal sense is so much more. It is breathing in the world around you and holding it in, not for the desire to cut off the oxygen supply to your brain, but the desire to bring the world into who you are as an entity. It is living by your heart, not only because that is the center of your ability to exist, but the metaphorical heart we have all grown up indoctrinated to follow. Ever since we were children our parents, teachers, and friends, have all said those words –you know, the ones we let slip through our minds without ever really pondering what is being said. The words that are so copiously regurgitated unto us all.

“Follow your heart.”

     But what if you don’t know where your heart is going? What if it provides you with no direction or desires? What if it is simply just numb?
    
     How can I be alive when no part of my soul is living? C.S. Lewis once said, “You don’t have a soul, you are a soul—you have a body.” What does this mean for people like me? People who struggle every day to break through the impervious wall that is numbness; a numbness so heavy it breaks you down even more with every fleeting step. For I want nothing in this life, except to inspire joy in the life of others. I want nothing for myself, not that I can’t be selfish frequently, but because I just am. I just exist. That is all; nothing more nothing less. I just am. I have no desire to awake from my slumber most days; a slumber that allows me to dream of possibilities too emotional to address in real life. Maybe it is because being numb is easy –yeah that’s it, being numb is easy. Does this mean I am dead? Not actually living? Why does that thought not terrify me?
   
     Yet I continue to allow this fake smile to permeate my existence because I know it is better for those around, but inside I am breaking. 

    Death has a way of doing that to people, it simply just breaks you down to your core. Tonight I am drowning and I see the debris of who I used to be floating beside me. I try with all my might to use the pieces as a buoy, to simple stay above the water, but those broken pieces once again are my downfall. Life has this uncanny ability to toss curve balls in our paths. Some of them are amazing, like first kisses, or scholarships you weren't expecting. Some of them are God awful, like your family fighting over the belongings your dad left behind, and missing him incessantly. I guess it is all in the perspective we choose to have. I am trying so hard to look at the positive curve balls, the ones I am able to send soaring out of the park, but sometimes I am blind. 

    Tonight I just want to breathe, dammit! I want to be alive again. I want to stop missing you, Dad. I want to stop fighting with my siblings over what physical items you left here to remember you by. I want to do nothing but snuggle up on the couch and watch scrubs with the sweetest guy. I want to be myself, and lay all my depression and anxiety on the table so maybe I can actually deal with it. But for now, for this very second, I want to just breathe.