Air

Air

He’s telling me the air is too thick to breath.

He needs to move to a different chair.

I watch him get up from the chair beside me, wander around the room, breathing carefully, judging the air.

“It’s better here.” He says and sits by the window.

Our visits are always the same. They start well then slowly disintegrate. When I arrive, he is whole, then bit by bit I watch as he dissects his thought process into little tiny pieces. Within in an hour he needs to be alone.

We have fifteen minutes left.

“How’s Mom doing?” He squeezes the question out between breaths, growing increasingly uncomfortable with his new location.

“Good, good, her new knee is working.”

“And her hip?”

“Good.”

I want to say something funny, like, she’s almost bionic, or something. I want to make him laugh, forget himself for a moment, but I can’t.

I find these visits exhausting, I’m so tired of his illness, I’m tired of his lack of improvement.

That’s the biggest downfall when you are broken…it’s boring.

“She asks about you; you should call her.” I do my duty as the sibling caught between the aging and the ill. I communicate the obvious, knowing it means nothing.

“I will.” He says, but I know he won’t.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” I ask.

I wish he were a dog. I wish his tail would wag, show excitement at something, anything. But he’s just a terrified mess, standing at the edge of the inside of his head, trying not to jump.

I know he will never go outside; his outside days ended a year ago. He is worried it might happen far from home, that it will be unexpected, in the subway, on the street. No one will know him, no one will help him, and he won’t be able to get back. His brain will be pushed over the edge, and nothing will make sense. He will spend the rest of his days a stranger in his own mind.

“No, I’m fine.” He finally says. Pausing long enough to make it look like something he would actually consider.

As he shifts in his chair, I can tell he is about to relocate. His final destination is usually the bathroom, he tells me the air is thinner in there.

“Do you want some milk?” I ask. He told me drinking milk and eating oranges helps him feel like he is still inside himself. He thinks there is a chemical compound in both milk and oranges that help him to know that what he hears and what he sees are really what he is hearing and seeing. With a nice cold glass of milk, he will be safely tucked into this moment.

“Sure.” He says.

I get up and go to the kitchen, open the fridge and pour a glass of milk from one of the fifty milk cartons stacked in his refrigerator.

“Who gets your milk for you?” I yell from the kitchen.

He doesn’t answer me. I forget he won’t answer me unless he sees me speaking, he needs to see my lips move while I speak. That way he knows I’m actually talking, that the voice isn’t coming from somewhere else.

“Who gets your milk for you?” I ask again while handing him his glass.

“A friend.” He never talks about friends. As far as I know, no one has the patience for his insanity.

He takes the glass of milk from me and drinks it down while staring at me.

“What?” I stare back at him as he hands the empty glass to me.

“No one knows how lucky they are, being able to just move around in this world, go anywhere.”

“It will get better; you just have to push yourself.” I say that but in order to push yourself, part of you has to push.

“I’m trying.” He whispers.

“I know.”

With that he gets up and goes to the washroom…where the air is thinner.