oxygen

When lights spark the periphery and you feel a burn deep within you, there is this unrelenting pursuit to stay in the moment. You reach for something that just isn’t there.

“Miss Miles?” He’s shaking me violently.

“Mmmm?” Stop that.

“MISS MILES!” More shaking.

I open my eyes. Bright lights. Masks and eyes floating above me. Like a kaleidoscope. It’s mesmerizing. So pretty.

“Can you hear me? Miss Miles?!” He’s shaking my shoulders. Stop shaking me.

“Miss Miles. Can you breathe?” His eyes look frantic.

I try to take a breath. My body will not cooperate. SHIT.

I try again, my chest heaves. Nothing is entering. Thick panic crawls up every inch of my body like lightning.

I begin thrashing, but I can’t fully control my body. I begin slinging my head back and forth, trying to sit up, stretching my neck upward. Anything. Anything to get air.

Why the fuck can’t I breathe?

I want to scream. My eyes search the room imploring the swirl of faces. Help me!

Hands are grabbing at me, but I twist my body from them throwing myself toward the edge of the gurney.

Help me goddammit!

Another shouty voice yells, “Get control of her now! She’s going to throw up!”

“Still not breathing. Bag her!”

I’m seeing sparkles and lights in my vision. There is a deep starvation. A hunger I can’t name. My muscles burn and I am losing the ability to put up a fight. Suddenly, someone is pressing me down, a hand on my forehead, and a mask goes on my face. Air rushes into me. It’s as if a seal is broken. Relief floods me, my body relaxes and I feel a giant surge of euphoria. Then the lights go back out.

When lights spark the periphery and you feel a burn deep within you, there is this unrelenting pursuit to stay in the moment. You reach for something that just isn’t there. Nothing meets your empty hand.

It shows up all the time. Like a light switch you reach for, but it left years ago. The panic that comes when air, or love, or safety, or certainty, is suddenly withheld. The body thrashes, the mind spins, the ancient wiring screams survive.

Since then, I’ve noticed how quickly the body recognizes absence. Not just oxygen. Anything essential. The mind may try to intellectualize deprivation, rename it, minimize it, but the body knows immediately when something sustaining has been interrupted. It revolts. It searches. It reaches.

Today, for the first time in years, I had to stop my car for a funeral procession.

Traffic froze in every direction while the hearse moved slowly through the intersection, mourners trailing behind it with blinking hazard lights. An entire road full of strangers paused for one body. No one knew the person inside. Most of us would forget the moment before dinner. Still, the world yielded for them briefly.

There was something strangely human in that suspension. Not dramatic. Not even particularly emotional. Just a collective agreement that for a moment, ordinary movement would give way to fragility.

I sat there thinking about how rarely we stop willingly. How often we continue forcing ourselves forward while starved for air, mistaking motion for survival.

My eyes groggily opened against dim lighting. Beeping behind my head. An extreme ache crawling up my arm into my neck. Groaning I reached to rub where the ache was radiating”

“Don’t grab, you have an IV there. You’re getting magnesium, it has to go in fast. If the pain is too much you can press that button, you’re on a morphine pump.” Her face is blurry, but I think She has glasses.

I reach for the button and close my eyes. My hand drops. I’m so tired.

“I’ll do it for you.” She presses the button.

A prickling itchiness runs up my back and I feel as if I’m sinking into a dark hole.

“A respiratory therapist will be….”

I reach for consciousness like a drowning person claws toward the surface.

What happened?

My mind claws upward through the dark, trying to hold onto the moment before it disappears entirely. The beeping. The ache in my arm. The blurry woman with glasses. Proof that I am still here.

Oxygen stopped arriving like it should. The body panicked and fought to stay. But that isn’t what I remember most. I remember the reaching. The violent, instinctive grasp toward something just beyond my hand. Air. Consciousness. Safety. The same reaching I see everywhere now, hidden beneath ordinary movement. Cars pulling over for the dead. Lovers clinging to one another. People exhausting themselves trying to outrun silence long enough to believe they are still alive.