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You Need to Breathe
Sep. 5th, 2012 09:56 amWhen we left the house, after I'd printed out the school registration forms from online for her son and we were getting into the car for me to drive her to the store and then back to her place again, she looked at me and said,
"You look really stressed. You need to breathe."
And I couldn't say anything, for a minute, because it hit me that this was a line directly out of the book, the one I'm reading again, bit by bit, because I have to.
It's a book about the end of the world, called The Dog Stars, and the survivalist Bangley says it over and over to the protagonist Hig to get him through an attack on the trail near their compound, where Hig is out alone and Bangley has spotted the intruders, from the tower they built to protect their perimeter, but is too far away to effectively engage.
After the attack, which Hig survives due to a sort of deus ex machina provided by Bangley, Hig says,
"Bangley
Yes, Hig?
You're always telling me to breathe.
Laughter through the [portable radio] unit. Genuine relieved laughter. A draught of cold water.
Better than if you fucking don't, huh, Hig?"
The difference is, the one now telling me to breathe is the one out on the trail. Alone with her child in a city where she's afraid. Without a car. Without the one who brought her here.
The one whose mistakes, miscalculations, and outright misdeeds it seems my everlasting duty to amend, adjust, if possible fix.
She is, for want of a softer and therefore less accurate word, another castoff, another girl who has briefly passed through my son's life and then been summarily set adrift.
And so she's out there and I'm back here, inside my own safe perimeter, needing to remember, needing to breathe, needing to become my own better self. Because there are others like her, brave and at risk, who may be depending on it...
LPK
LiveJournal
9.5.2012 (a)
(The exchange between Hig and Bangley, quoted above, is from Peter Heller's book, The Dog Stars, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2012.)
"You look really stressed. You need to breathe."
And I couldn't say anything, for a minute, because it hit me that this was a line directly out of the book, the one I'm reading again, bit by bit, because I have to.
It's a book about the end of the world, called The Dog Stars, and the survivalist Bangley says it over and over to the protagonist Hig to get him through an attack on the trail near their compound, where Hig is out alone and Bangley has spotted the intruders, from the tower they built to protect their perimeter, but is too far away to effectively engage.
After the attack, which Hig survives due to a sort of deus ex machina provided by Bangley, Hig says,
"Bangley
Yes, Hig?
You're always telling me to breathe.
Laughter through the [portable radio] unit. Genuine relieved laughter. A draught of cold water.
Better than if you fucking don't, huh, Hig?"
The difference is, the one now telling me to breathe is the one out on the trail. Alone with her child in a city where she's afraid. Without a car. Without the one who brought her here.
The one whose mistakes, miscalculations, and outright misdeeds it seems my everlasting duty to amend, adjust, if possible fix.
She is, for want of a softer and therefore less accurate word, another castoff, another girl who has briefly passed through my son's life and then been summarily set adrift.
And so she's out there and I'm back here, inside my own safe perimeter, needing to remember, needing to breathe, needing to become my own better self. Because there are others like her, brave and at risk, who may be depending on it...
LPK
LiveJournal
9.5.2012 (a)
(The exchange between Hig and Bangley, quoted above, is from Peter Heller's book, The Dog Stars, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2012.)
