The way she breathes

Three seconds, on repeat

Photo by Tim Goedhart on Unsplash

An adult human will generally inhale for about 1.5 seconds, followed by the same duration to exhale. The practice of breathing is an effort to balance pressure between one’s lungs and the available atmosphere. All up, in one minute, an adult will take anywhere between 12 and 16 breaths. Or, in other words, three seconds is the range of a complete respiratory action, start to finish.

I know the biology through the field study afforded by the starboard side of a marriage bed, decades sleeping beside one woman, hearing her breaths, watching shoulders slightly rise and dip in the moonlight as a dream takes holds or turns.

Uncommonly, beautifully short, black hair, always touching the pillow imperceptibly after my evening fatigue crash.

Wakening each morning, this woman breathes with me, loving, giving, caring, and stressing when my body suffers pain that is sandpaper to the rusted blades of medications.

If only I could give her back all those breaths, and more, returned into her lungs for another 50 years as a mother, Oma, Great Oma.

And yet, she would give every three-second rise and fall to me, expending her last if it made me exhale one more time than her.

Sometimes, the three seconds becomes one, quickened as she laughs at my hilarious humour, which is not at all hilarious and only tolerably humorous.

Other moments are longer, maybe four or five seconds, as she calms her lungs with deep, reviving inhales, slowing down the pace of a world too loud, too fast, too lonely.

And I leave the starboard side of this marriage bed quietly, limping a bit, always less stealthily than I attempt. She opens an eye in the dark, I know, and she follows my path in secret, then waits until I leave, making sure I am safe. Door closed slowly behind me, her eyelid turns back closed. After, alone again in the room for three seconds more, she slips back to sleep.