thanksgiving

‘There are so many different types of breathing you do in the night. And all of them are violent,’ says Pete.

At 4am I convince myself that I’m finally dying, after hours of sucking down extra ventolin, then feeling miserable about poisoning the tiny human practicing his acrobatics in my belly. Every time I’m about to slip into unconsciousness I feel Pete’s hand on my hip or thigh as he rolls me onto my side to quiet the raspy, the shallow, the low rumble. 

My lungs are heavy like I’m 12 years old and writing ‘asthma sucks’ in red texta while a nebuliser mists up the mask strapped to my face.

Sure there’s a baby overlay. More blood to oxygenate, less space to do it in. Nose bleeds and the tiniest speck of blood in my phlegm. That’s normal pregnancy stuff, right? 

Plus it’s spring, the conkers exploding on footpaths beneath plane trees, releasing pollen with eye hooks. The wind ushers yellow crop dust through city streets in eddies. The twisted espalier in our back yard buds despite the fact that it’s strapped down tight to a 100-year-old brick wall. 

Even the cherry blossoms on the good luck card from my branch manager make my eyes water.

But after all those years of saying to Shell ‘I hate myself I want to die’ for a joke when things went wrong and it felt like melodrama was the only way out, now I really am going tod die. i’m sure if it. I’m going to leave my fella with a tiny baby just after I’ve found them both.

If I listen closer, there’s an echo of chop chop on my lungs, bought under the counter from a newsagent in Flinders Street, which made me hack so hard I wished for added cough suppressant. my breath carries the trace of bitty filter fragments, scraped from the bottom of a homemade pouch full of Dr Pat. A hint of the surprise heroin someone gave me to inhale at a party in a basement while I was already seeing double, washing through my gills like sleep, like going home. 

Except those were the fun years, years of excusable excess. They released me from an older Doncaster dread, the days I was so lost and bored that I tried to quiet the bath water but couldn’t stop my heart from sending out a ripple to remind me that I was still alive despite myself. Defeated, I had let the water out, smoked three Marlboro Lights on the roof watching the stars and then hid in the cupboard when I heard my friend Mick knocking on the front door. 

This close, Mick, I was this close. 

I came close again a few years ago, sitting on the couch with my girlfriend, too thin and too exhausted to argue that I disliked The L Word not because I felt threatened by lesbians, but because it was a stupid soap, same as True Blood and Mad Men and Bold. To change the subject I poured another round of martinis, stared at a screen full of women having sex on share house couches and thought, the only way I’m getting out of this relationship is to die.

Now I want a 24-hour life insurance policy so Pete doesn’t have to raise the boys on his own. I want this new one to splash water out of the bath, for us to watch Rage into the nights we can’t sleep through. I want all the boys to know me. I want to meet L’s first love, to hear the two of them knocking around upstairs. I want to see which way N goes.

I don’t want to have to sleep on my own because the sludge in my lungs keeps Pete awake before it pulls me under. After all those years of not caring whether I made it to 40, I’ve trained my brain so well I can’t imagine being there to watch our bub grow up, or loving Pete so long that we grow grey and dangly together.

I press the little silver disc on my bracelet, the one that says ‘make a wish’, a gift I thought cheesy at first but now know is a way to give thanks. Or at least an attempt to undo the more miserable wishes I’ve made in my life.

Beside me in bed, Pete breathes like a racehorse: strong, steady, deep. I feel like Sigourney Weaver as the baby ripples across my stomach, alien. He has the hiccups for the third time today. There is life within me and around me: it’s almost unbearable how good it feels. I must be dying.