Category: Prose
Theme: When love feels like an oxygen after a lifetime of gasping
You're the open window in a smoke-filled room I was stuck in. Loving you helps me breathe.
Before you, breath came in fragments—borrowed from spaces that never welcomed me. Every breath was a labor. I always waited for the next collapse, living in the anxiety between breaths. I've known the panic of my body betraying me, slumbering among the stillness and inhaler rites.
But you walked in, and suddenly I no longer found myself gasping for air. You didn't fix me—you simply opened the window.
You let the air in.
You didn't even ask if I was struggling—you knew. I don't have to tell you. All I had to do was unravel myself in the spaces of your fingers to hold me delicately. You let me breathe on my own terms, with your hand steady near mine.
And it's strange. To laugh without coughing up parts of myself. Around you, I don't have to fight for oxygen. Love, you see, is not a battlefield inside my chest where my lungs are drained soldiers. I didn't know love could feel like breathing through open windows. My lungs don't clench. My body doesn't panic. Because you're there. And your presence is a kind of breathing that medicine can't replicate.
I used to measure life in breaths that didn't hurt. Now I measure them by how long I get to breathe beside you. For as long as I'm with you. Could this be it? This is what it means to breathe with someone—not just beside them, but because of them.
You are the first breath after the fire. You are the open window. You are the reason my lungs remember how to hope. You are the first thing that made me feel like I could exhale. You are that moment. Again and again.
And I'm finally breathing.
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