Creative Nonfiction: Breathe

By Bailey Flaherty 

 

The airport is crowded as you step inside the sliding glass doors. The checked bag stations are full, and you hear your mother take a deep breath (she has anxiety like you, you know it, but she refuses to take any medication). Her nerves heighten yours; you feel like your own meds aren’t working, now suddenly aware of every bone in your body, of all the nerves and blood vessels keeping you alive. Your lungs are heavy; you can’t breathe. 

You’ve been inside the airport for less than a minute: Why can’t you breathe?

You feel silly. You wonder if any of the other people checking their bags are on your flight to Boston. You wonder if anyone else is on the verge of a panic attack at the thought of leaving home for four months. Does anyone else have a one-way flight? Is anyone else’s mother flying home alone? 

You start to picture it: your mother, cooking dinner for one, eating at a kitchen table built for two. Your house has been just you and your mother for a while now (and the dog, sure, but he won’t fill the empty seat you’ve left). Will the house crumble when you leave? You haven’t thought of those consequences until now—of the aftershocks that will ensue. You feel like you are single-handedly abandoning the woman who has raised you. 

(How could you be so selfish as to move across the country? Why are you having a panic attack at the entrance to the airport? Your lungs are constricted, but you need to get it together. Your throat is rough, but there are bags to check and security to go through and a one-way flight to catch. There is no time to stop and get air. Get it together: you are the one leaving. Why are your own actions so damn terrifying?)

So you check your bags and go through TSA. You make your way to the gate marked Boston Logan. Your mother hasn’t spoken to you since you arrived: she can tell you’re upset. (Doesn’t that make you feel guilty? You are the one leaving. Why should your mother give you comfort? Don’t you remember that empty table? That collapsed house of yours because you took away a central column? Don’t you remember this is all your fault?)

You have half an hour until you board, so you try to read the book you’ve brought, but you can’t focus. You’re thinking about how much you cried last night and how much you cried this morning. You’re thinking about this new city you’ve chosen to give yourself to. You’re thinking about that empty table.

(Who will fill that spot while you’re halfway across the country? Why would you destroy your home?)

 Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. 

You can tell your mother is sad, too, but she busies herself with a crossword in the way you can’t manage to busy yourself with your book. You wonder how she’s managed to look so perfectly kept together when twenty minutes ago you wondered if, maybe, she couldn’t breathe either. (She isn’t gasping for air beside you. Why would you think that?) You wonder if she’s mastered this art, and if she’s learned, through raising you (and through all those other life experiences that you always neglect thinking about because you’re so selfish), how to adapt. She will be okay without you — she has a life, after all, she has things that don’t involve you — but you don’t know if you’ll be okay without her. 

Maybe, you think, that empty table isn’t your own absence, but your mother’s. You realize, as the attendant asks more boarders to check their bags for this very full flight, that you’ve gotten this all wrong. That the panic rising inside of you is futile because you are abandoning yourself, not your mother. You are running away from your home, from all those people who love you. You are giving yourself to a new city, to strangers, and leaving them — leaving your people — behind. Take a breath, try to fill your lungs with air. 

You can’t? Why not? 

(You know why. Of course you know why. That empty table is following you to Boston. 

The people you love are not. You’re selfish. You’re suffocating.) 

Maybe alone, a thousand miles from home, you will finally be able to breathe. 

 

 

 

 

 

Bailey Flaherty is a creative writing major at Emerson College, where she currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of their HerCampus chapter. In her free time, Bailey enjoys reading and writing about magical quests, researching weird and wild histories, and spending time with her friends and girlfriend.