SEA OF HEARTBREAK
I can’t breathe. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck I can’t breathe! My eyes pop open as a full-body panic attack sets in. Through my haze, I see my hands strapped to the bed. “Oh, fuck. Not again. I—” I’m gasping for air. There are tubes coming out of my mouth— This is new. I raise my head and realize I’m in a hospital. But where? How did I get here? What the fuck happened? That’s when I see my parents sitting in chairs at the end of my bed, near a window. The heartbreak and despair in their eyes are unmistakable. To their right stands a nurse. She’s telling me to calm down and let the tubes do the breathing for me, but I’m too panicked. I begin thrashing in the bed, trying to break the woven nylon straps that are keeping me from ripping the tubes out of my mouth. Later I’ll find out this is the reason I was restrained in the first place.

I do my best to communicate with the nurse with my eyes. I’m pleading with her to take the tubes out, but to no avail. If my eyes could have screamed, they would have been saying, “I can’t force myself not to breathe! Please, for the love of whatever piece-of-shit god you believe in, get these fucking tubes out of me!” Unfortunately, the nurse was not fluent in eye language, but luckily my parents figured it out and advocated on my behalf.

A doctor arrived and the tubes were removed. My memory is blurry, but I do recall it was painful, so painful that my mother had to leave the room. One of the tubes was in my lungs, breathing for me; the other was in my stomach, soaking up the alcohol, pills, and whatever other ugliness was down there.