EXHALE

It was your laugh that reminded me to breathe. It was your squeakgigglehushshoutlaugh and childish joy on the side of the highway in Tecpán, Guatemala while my throat closed and you dropped ripe strawberries onto the head of the giggling toddler wrapped around your leg.

Mis pantalones! you yelled as you slow-motion monster walked down the rows of black plastic suffocating the weeds around the ripe, bleeding fruit.

I was on the (flip)phone, pleading for help from our leader/teacher/29-year-old father figure/only English speaking point of contact for a million miles.

No, like, I can’t breathe, I insisted into essentially a walkie talkie, stifling a laugh as I watched you raise your arms and twist your face into a menacing growl, your skinny 6’3” shadow that much less menacing.

You sound fine to me, just wait until work is over, and we’ll check it out at lunch.

I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry as Isaac instructed me to hang in there, drink water, and not let you get too far.

Did you hear that Sasa? I yelled. If I start to suffocate you have to save my life, okay?

Of course! You yelled. Wait, how do I do that?

I tilted my bottle upwards and a sun-warmed bubble of filtered-ish water stretched my inflamed throat. Your giant footsteps stopped at my side, and you both looked at me from a droopy side angle, my two worried puppies.

The farmer that was responsible for us on some days for some amount of hours some parts of the week loped by with one shoulder-length rubber glove covering the skin of one arm. My jaw hit the fertile dirt as he dipped his other hand, wrist, elbow, bicep, shoulder into the vat of pesticide, turning it in great circles to mix what was undoubtedly a lethal combination of Roundup + unregistered chemicals. Whatever allergic reaction I was having seemed to be directly correlated with my distance from the black bucket of death. Even he held his breath while the concoction leapt into the air.

RAWWWRRRR, you hobbled across the field with two leeches now. The daughter of our farmer boss had materialized to torment you, latching onto your free leg and hiccuping with joy between bites of stolen strawberries. You swung them in wide arcs until all four of us were laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe.

When we started our gap year program and moved in with our host families in the highlands of Mayan Guatemala, your lack of language skills and aversion to rule following fascinated me. I choked on my laughter when you called a duck “pollo de agua” and our profesora had to leave the classroom to compose herself. That was the first time you stole the air out of the room. A few weeks into our gap year program, you’d already earned one of two possible strikes for drinking when I found you sipping a beer on a park swing. I matched the height of your arc before I asked you.

It took 84 minutes for you to breathe your story into me. I cleared the mist and tried to translate, but every duck was a pollo de agua I could only almost understand. I could picture but not smell the smoking gun out the passenger window of a van you shouldn’t have been near or that shouldn’t have been near you. I could hear but not touch the slurs yelled between gangs, open brawls at house parties that blared rap I don’t listen to. I could see but not feel the rough ridges of graffiti sprawled across government buildings in colors that meant not just red or blue but ally or enemy. I couldn’t taste the joints smoked then delt then smoked and delt then man that wasn’t yours to smoke then pop pop but they were only a cover for the sharper

harder stuff that lasts longer harder stuff who buys this stuff?

I only heard it from you, the conditional parental love that would support your college education if and only if you should successfully complete our program: five countries, three host families, Salmonella and tapeworms and heat rash and malaria and attempted kidnappings and marriage proposals and an overdose and one hundred seminars and Kindle readings and hard conversations about what’s wrong with the world; is it everything? I couldn’t wait to hear the wrong with the world, an 18-year-old American Girl, I boarded plane #1 with a full heart, a full cup, a full hydroflask covered in pastel stickers. No one but the synchronized swings and the liquor tienda knew you came to us can empty.

With one eye on your second strike, I asked about the empty can in your hand. My tongue flicked self-sabotage and my heart whispered, are you okay? You looked at me with wide, sleepy eyes and waited long enough to answer that I forgot to breathe. That was the second time.

Two weeks later the rest of our farming group was sick or tired or feeling particularly crushed under the weight of the issues we studied, and you and I walked to our field alone. Our farmer handed us machetes and we pretended we were samurai’s every time he didn’t turn around. A few miles later they drooped by our sides with our heads, hung low as our voices in the six-somethingA.M. mist.

We talked about the group, the other twelve cups of varying volumes set out around the world to kiss the cheeks of its vulnerable. We talked about your crush (which changed more often than mine), words light like helium balloons rising with the sun on this particularly windy morning. It was your capacity to love that struck me, unconditional born from conditional. You pulled your big yellow sweatshirt over my head and it hung to my knees. You asked me, Do you ever want to go home?

At the end of the second month, your strikes had run out two times over. Our leader/teacher/29-year-old parental figures were at the bottom of their patience no matter how much I poured in. I remember the night they confirmed your face with the bartender. I wiped my tears and sucked in my breath before knocking on your host mom’s door. It took two hours to pack your bags in slow motion. It was silent except for our breath and the thump of the big yellow sweatshirt you tossed to me.

I often wonder if finishing the program would’ve been good for you, whether it would have filled your cup with joy and connection and love for travel and nature and food and people as it did mine. Sometimes I think it would have, and your parents would’ve paid for your degree, but on the days when the sun can’t break through the mist, I assume they would’ve found another excuse to reopen the hole we patched in the bottom of your cup. Sometimes I am angry at them and us and me for failing to give you infinite chances, sometimes I am angry at you for sucking them dry.

When the program ended and I turned on my phone, your hair was seven months longer but your laugh still made mine bubble. You helped me navigate American suburbia, and I tried to fill your cup with tools to process what we’d lived too late after the fact.

You can do this, you insisted as I melted down in a yard I didn’t recognize, afraid to drive a car I didn’t recognize.

People can be good, let them. I promised when you called me at almost the morning, trying to gain footing on a crumbling floor.

A big yellow sweatshirt held me together during my second attempt at the grocery store after my first left me crying in the cereal aisle cursing surplus, options, and American waste. The broken pieces of the lives we returned to were different, the people who left them and the ones that returned even more so.

I met the messenger by accident. My cup one year fuller, I set out to study abroad across a different ocean and threw out your name as the only thread of connection I had to the hometown she named.

I went to highschool with Sasa! she squealed, hugging me. You beamed when we called, but I thought I made up your urgent strain behind I wish I was there.

In between your questions about my efforts to find joy and connection and love for travel and nature and food and people, we talked about your steady climb. Your life was boring you, but it’s the good kind! It was school and work boring, preparing and building boring. Soon! I promised. I am so happy for you, I’ll see you soon.

I was wearing a big yellow sweatshirt the third time you took my breath away.

I can’t stop wondering how your tent popped open and I can’t breathe.

It’s the only thing I see when I look at police photos of the wide, grassy median of I-295 northbound on-ramp from Washington Ave.

I wonder if it was lodged between the two halves of your car that wound up ten feet apart severed by two tall pine trees that are still standing and you’re not and I can’t breathe.

I wonder whether you had been coming from or seeking a campsite, a night in the woods away from the city that suffocated you and I’m suffocating.

I wonder about the rate of your breath when it stopped. Was it fast or was it still? Is mine fast or is it still am I breathing still?

I wonder whether you had been tossing an empty can into the trash bag you kept in the backseat of your car to keep your friends from littering or just drinking in the wind that raced by your open windows way too fast or had you been drinking? My throat is closing I think. Did you hear that Sasa? If I start to suffocate you have to save my…” bed of a pickup, circa the end (beginning) of the world digital photography

I wait for your laugh.

I often wonder at the volume of your cup when it bottomed out. Sometimes I am angry at them and us and me for failing to give you infinite chances, sometimes I am angry at you for sucking them dry. Most of the time I pull a big yellow hood up over my ears and try to remember to breathe.