One breath away

Today I cried because I saw a boy who couldn’t breathe. He must have been fourteen, and was with a woman -his mother, I guess- standing on the pavement, waiting for a taxi that would no doubt take them to the nearest hospital. She was trying to calm him down, stroking his head, and probably saying soothing words to him. She looked worried but, at the same time, relaxed, possibly had been through this so many times before. I couldn’t hear her, could only hear him panting, putting a lot of effort in every exhalation but apparently not getting any oxygen in return. He looked tired, freaked out, and I couldn’t help but cry briefly and silently while from a distance watching his pale face and hearing his suffocated respiration and his moans.
Once I was told that crying is the physiological manifestation of this fact: something that has settled inside you in the wrong place finally finds its own place. In principle, I don’t have a very good predisposition towards this sort of explanation, but at the same time I’m totally prepared to believe them. Anything but keep on feeling like a jigsaw that can’t be solved.
Apparently, we tend to swallow our pain, which inmediately tries to find a quick way out without going through the heart. But it finds tempting corners, small cosy spaces, and decides to get stuck in there. I think I could detect some of those in different parts of my anatomy, it could explain the stiffness of some of my muscles, or even my sporadic resistance to being touched, as if sometimes the harshness of the sorrows under my skin couldn’t stand any contact. But sometimes I’ve thought that carrying, as I do, a scream and an imaginary dog, there shouldn’t be any spare room in my body for misplaced feelings of any kind.
But there is room.
And sometimes I can hardly breathe, myself, although I keep on saying “I’m fine, I’m really fine, I’m really really fine,” to prevent myself from collapsing. It works most of the time. But suddenly an old perfume fills the air and it becomes saturated with vain expectations, or there isn’t any strawberry ice cream left in the supermarket, a baby hippo is born in the zoo, or the wind blows the leaves I’ve been carefully sweeping, or even a boy struggles for breath in front of me and the bloody taxi doesn’t come.

Then a chill runs through my heart and I know that a bit of my raw unabashed sadness has finally reached the place where it belongs. Afterwards it will disolve in my tears.And my body shall breathe again. And at that very moment that sensation will be the greatest truth I can state about who I am.