Falling from Grace - Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara

Chapter 13 - Holding my breath

Dear Rooney,

I hold my breath because I think that if I can't breathe, I can't feel it and without feeling it I won't remember you and if I don't remember you it won't hurt. But I've thought of you even before thought about holding my breath.

Desperate situations make us take desperate measures and mine is to believe that the whole problem is in the oxygen that enters my bloodstream when I pass through somewhere we breathe together, as if the oxygen molecules were attached to a few thousand molecules of you and they will accumulate on the walls of each of my arteries, veins, and blood vessels, clogging me of the lack I feel of your smell more than I already feel clogged.

I hold my breath the way my mother taught me to do when she used to pass Neosporin on my skinned knees, but this is not a skinned knee. However, it burns like if it was and I keep holding my breath as if feeding each one of my bronchi would also fed the lack that I feel of being close to you. And I can't take it anymore. But I know it's unreal to expect a feeling to die of starvation when every step, every blink of an eye, every movement of my body is involuntary or thought-cases reminding me of something about you and that's one god damn full plate so the feeling it's always filled up.

I hold my breath and close my eyes tightly, which makes me think of how you used to narrow your eyes every single time you gave me your white teeth's wide smile, that made my eyes burn like when I look at the sun. Still burns, but now it's no longer a nice burn like the peppermint cigarette I smoked while you twisted your nose. It's a sore burn. So sore that it leaves me breathless.

That's that.

Now I don't even know if I'm holding my breath to not think of you or if the breath is holding itself inside of me because I think too much about you.

The thing is that I don't want to think about you anymore. I want to be able to breathe relieved because it doesn't hurt anymore, knowing that it will mean that I no longer think of you, because I already let you go completely, but I don't want to let you go. I didn't want you to leave me when you really did and now I'm here without you but you're in my memory.

What means to have you at least somewhere, somehow.

And I stay here trying to understand if I want the pain of not being able to not think of you or the emptiness of not having you to think anymore.

I try to put both situations on an internal balance and see what will weigh more, and doing so I end up hurting myself even more knowing that this is a choice that I can't do because I'll just stop thinking about you when I don't think about you anymore, without even noticing that I finally let you go from inside me.

But until that day comes it will hurt a lot and I will keep holding my breath.

Could you please come back?

- Yours truly, Cate