Oxygen

Stuck in my comfortable place of discontent, I talk to my father in the living room. The governor was on the wall screaming  about bad numbers, and through the windows was grey.

“Papa look.”  I point at the emptiness of the outside, protesting every unpleasant or depressing detail of my hollowed out, virus-ridden city. I complain, and I sulk, and I pout, until I find my formidable vocabulary is quickly forgotten by the other place. 

I turn the TV off and put my back to the windows, and I describe the tall redwoods on that California mountain I’ll climb once I leave this place, and how the soft red soil will feel on my feet, about the road trip I’ll take with Emma, or Mark, or Chloe or whoever when he buys me that ‘05 Jeep Liberty I saw on Craigslist, my dorm when I move away, far away, on the other coast, and the stuff I’ll do there, what I’ll see, and what I’ll feel. I fantasize about the other, expectantly inevitable, time of liberation, when I can hug and share and run and  ride and walk and be away. 

“Home is like health.” My father says. “You don’t miss it until it’s gone.”  His voice brings the window back, and the governor, and the greyness that is here, and my fantasy’s thin walls crumbles with the gross pragmatism of his words. Sensibility wrecks dreams.

~~

It’s another time now, but it's still the same and I’m still here, but now I’m near the sea by the Red Hook impound lot I run to. With my red bandanna hiding my flushed face, I am bent over and wheezing. Another thing like family, I think. You don’t realise how much you miss oxygen until it's gone. 

I stay bent, cursing the clouds in the sky, cursing the Earth, cursing the atoms, cursing the mask, cursing my lungs.  Running used to be another place. Now, as I wheeze and struggle for my breath, I wonder why I can’t. I can’t do my escape, I can’t do something else other than sit and wait. Now I am here, wondering where my f*cking breath is is, and I wheeze, and then I look around at the grey, why am I here again, about to stumble back onto my a**. 

The impound lot is empty though, and I take the bandana off of my face. The cold sea air stings the layer of sweat that glazes my face. The oxygen comes back, and the mask is off. The air, the same sea air that you can feel over there, in California, in somewhere else, gives me oxygen. And the mask is gone. Maybe I hate masks now, because they’re here, and I should be over there running in the free wind, with all the oxygen I need, and be gone. 

There I don’t have my mask, but freedom is fantasy now, and fantasy is freedom, and freedom has rice paper walls.

~~

For those two weeks, I couldn’t breathe, so I couldn’t run. I was stuck in here. Maybe it was the virus, the inescapable virus, but it was probably because I didn’t wash my mask. Now, I run, with my washed mask, and I breathe, a still limitless, but constricted supply of oxygen. 

I went to a trail once, and I ran without my mask, and I was somewhere else. But that was over there. I can’t do that, because I’m here, and to be sensible, is to be safe, is to wear a mask, is to fear, is to be safe, is to cower, is not to fantasize. 

Sensibility wrecks dreams.