Essay Experiment #16: Don't hold your breath--#52essays2017

I once held my breath for 4 minutes and 27 seconds.

6 years later, it would take only a quarter of that time for my newborn to be pulled out of my body, under duress. For a perfect cup of tea, tea afficionados will tell you two minutes is best. The Q train takes 4 minutes to speed across the park, underground. 

Holding your breath, you float in a dark that feels ancient, wide and inexplicable. That darkness is comforting, frighteningly so--despite the Christ-on-the-cross-on-day-two-type discomfort that sets into your cells as you resist exhaling. 

So, consider it: 4 min, 27 seconds. Go ahead, set a timer, I'll wait. 

I was face down in the water, all those minutes, Mike the Stud gently holding my hand.

We communicated in little pulses. When he squeezed me, I had to squeeze right back. Otherwise he would I assume I had gone unconscious and needed to be saved.

To do this, to rescue me, he would right my body and tilt my head back. There was some mammalian reflex involved that would keep a mammal-- I am one, fur bleached from South East Asia sun--from drowning herself. 

To hold your breath like this is like practicing a stellar kind of dying, on purpose. Your body has paroxysms of carbon dioxide buildup. The whole blank black universe is inside your head. Something begs to be expelled, and with your whole body relaxed, relaxed, every single cell, you say, no. 

Then Mike the Stud squeezes your hand and you squeeze back, floating like the desiccated husk of a shrimp at the surface of a chlorinated pool. Your rented wetsuit is dorky and too big.

You have not even dreamed of having babies yet. Well, you have dreamed many times but the dreams were cul-de-sacs full of could-be-anywhere shrubbery, thickets of heartache, boring too-tall-trees with no aesthetic charm.

Now, I know labor is a little like this.  Dying practice. Sport Apnea. The lungs trying to clutch themselves, to find something that isn't there. The body in a series of spasms that feel as old as its lizard-like knowledge of fear and poisoned berries.

The spasms continue, but I am limp. 

Mike is a pro-Relaxer, and it's his stalwart embodiment of doing so that I feel every time he gives his squeeze.

We spent a few hours with him in a classroom, learning the mechanics of this process.  What, exactly, was happening with our body chemistry as the gasses didn't exchange in their usual rhythm.  How the relaxation response would sustain disruption of the pattern of the autonomic nervous system. We drew little diagrams.  We practiced holding out breath without the conditions of water.  We heard Mike say, "Relax a little more." When a sexy person tells you to relax, part of you wants to listen just because. 

It's the same instruction you get in labor: relax. Your body revolts from the cue.  In labor, you are wet but without a wet suit.  If there is a friendly hand available, you are destroying it with the wrench of your grip. Light touch feels awful.  The water feels worse.

I never want to let go of Stud Mike. He is keeping track of me. What more could I ask? He is watching my body for even the tiniest sign that I cannot take it any more. 

After, when I am breathing air again and he congratulates me, he tells me my time. 4 min 27 seconds. Not bad, though not a world record. That was hit in 2012: 22 minutes, 22 seconds, by Stig Severinson.  So multiply my experience by 5 and you get his. That's the length of a television show.  That's how long it takes me to commute to work, on an easy day. That's how long it takes for my stepson to eat four bites of his breakfast cereal.  

But then again, Stig's never been in labor for 27 hours standing up, and refused nitrous oxide, has he.  But me? Scratch that off my bucket list. Endurance doesn't always translate: maybe 5 uteran contractions in, Stig would be crying for mercymercymercy, for his mommy, for one decent exhale.   We don't know. Talent is segmented; pain is bearable where you tell yourself it is, and even then, sometimes biology hoses down your pride, gives you a pie in the scrunched up face. 

Under water, static, breath not doing the one thing it's supposed to, people outclass me by a full quarter of an hour, and these pros spear fish and who knows, write underworld novellas in their minds, clip their elegant nose hairs-- while they are down there.

But I've lifted my head, I've said, that's all I can do. My hair gets caught on the zipper on my wetsuit.  

SMACK. Oxygen gives me a standing ovation, courses back into my body, makes reality as crisp as military haircut, as new hotel bedding.  I've always hated pulling back that kind of bedding, washed too hard, with too harsh detergent, trying to get rid of too much.  

Air flits around my head, competes for my mouth hole, like the molecules-- and I can feel each one-- are bees from a hive I've knocked over. 

My sad boyfriend takes our photograph. Me and Stud Mike, arms around each others' necks. Sad Boyfriend has held his breath longer than I have, and been better at it, and wants to try it again tomorrow, to be even more better than, with stud Mike. 

Stud Mike lives like a sport apnea monk 1/3 of the year, everything he ingests or efforts for or even thinks about weighed against whether or not it will improve or hamper his breathhold, increase his time spent under water, decrease his chance of passing out.

Some people do this static apnea sunk in a metal vessel, so they can't obey early impulses and break to the surface.

How long can you not do the very thing that you must do to live? It is such a weird challenge. I think I understand the urge to cheat something so basic. To be better than your autonomic demands. 

Sad Boyfriend and I were in Bali. We'd been traveling and teaching, and now we were by ourselves, together, completely alone, together, each of us drowning side by side and neither, with even the lightest grip, saving the other.  The island roads were too hot. My intestines had not yet turned to confetti. For some reason I had taught our hotel girl how to say "Babaganoush." Or maybe she had taught me, with a big grin used for word play with Westerners, that the local word for hello sounded like a middle eastern dish, mashed eggplant with tahini.  We said Babaganoush back and forth, because when you have one word in common, it's good to share it. It functions like Oxygen. 

Sand in my mouth most of that week. Sleeping as far as I could get to the other side of the bed from sad boyfriend.

Every time he went to ask me a question I held my breath. I most feared he would ask me to marry him, after traveling for the year together; I feared I would say yes.  It's how a movie would end.  He'd emerge from the water glistening, flexing his stocky muscles, a bright ring in his mouth. 

Relaxing holding a breath under water was a great displacement for our weak conversation, for the things we weren't saying. Mike, Mike, Mike. Mike lived the Island life and was completely confident in himself and his abilities. His tan looked painted on.  He was a clear teacher, was chiseled, happily poised on the perimeter of the impossible. He'd taught us free-diving in the days before, which sad boyfriend was also better at.  I kept popping back up to the surface, nothing could keep me upsidedown. It was hard to dive at all that way, my legs like pylons on a jetty. I felt like a stupid bath toy, bobbing senselessly in the wobbly rush of blue.

This happened in labor, too.  Someone would say, stay with it, stay in your pelvis, but there I was popping up to the surface, looking around for the sky.  Like the sky would save mammal me.  The sky has never once saved anyone. It's just a bigger place to get lost. 

My bathing suit was stretched out under my wetsuit, my hair too long, my body too depressed from who knows what.

The next day sad boyfriend left to do it again. To arrest time and be better than me, to go longer, to have the gentle touch of the stud on his wrist, to prove something.

I stayed at home at the little hotel, not wanting to feel so barren on the hot roads, crammed with tourists trying to find things to do that would make them look happy.  So I sat with a stray cat and an almost-used-up journal in the sunshine, smiling foolishly at hotel girl, saying back and forth, Babaganoush.

Later she asked me, he not your husband? 

It had made it easier to call ourselves married when we reserved rooms. 

No, I said. We are just traveling.

She nodded. 

I picked up my pen. Waited for Sad Boyfriend to come back, walking the roads without shoes just to show how natural he was.  I waited for Sad Boyfriend to come back and ate whatever vegetables they had on hand, and wrote things down.  Stud Mike on my wrist.  My whole body fighting to breathe, and over-riding, over-riding.  The puff of my wet suit above the blue-glow water, looking like a baby whale that had gotten confused and wound up in a sport pool.  Mike's pulse.  My pulse back.  Imperceptible, almost, in the end, like that moment before a baby loosens its primordial bond and replaces mother with oxygen.

The cry it makes, by most accounts, is horrible, the sweetest most broken sound in the world.