Are You Afraid Of Not Breathing?

We spent the evening on a boat, watching the sun set into the lake while the fisherman who took us out onto the water told us the tale of a road accident 2000-kilometers away that led him to give up a life of long-haul truck rides in favour of fishing. I jumped around on the boat, leaning over to touch the water, assessing whether it was too cold for me to take the plunge, and making my husband incredibly nervous. He's such an odd man. There are two things that scare the living hell out of him: Lizards and boats. I discovered his fear of boats a week after we got married, while we were on vacation in a quiet little sea-town. I took him out on a boat in the backwaters, and he spent the entire time sitting still, exactly in the middle, paralyzed into place and making angry faces at me each time I moved around or shook the boat. 

I wasn't raised to be afraid of the water, in fact, there is no concept of fear of the water in my entire family. I spent my childhood swimming lakes with my grandfather, showering under waterfalls with my mother, playing in ravines with my sister and sailing the oceans with my father. We're a watery people. It wasn't until I was well into adulthood that I really even realised that people could actually be scared of the water, and even today, I don't quite understand the fear. I watch it come over my husband every time he gets in a boat with me, he's so normal until we're standing on the shore, he even displays a childlike wonder of the water as he skips stones onto the surface and stands silently staring in amazement, but the moment we step onto a boat, he's completely stupified. 

"Why are you standing up?" He asked me, as I hopped over a little makeshift bench towards the hull. 

He's always surprised when someone on a boat moves, I think he believes boats are roller coasters and you're supposed to stay in place until the ride is over. 

"You want me to stay still?" I asked, "Tell me, please, what is this fear really about?" 

He didn't answer, instead he just watched me with horror as I took off my shoes to hang my feet into the water. 

"Is it about drowning?" I asked him, "You think the boat will sink and we will drown?" 

"Are you asking if I'm afraid of not breathing?" He asked rolling his eyes from behind the phone he was using to photograph me even as he was appalled at my boat-behaviour. 

He says I have a different personality when I am on a boat so he suffixes every reference to me with the word "boat". He doesn't call me his girlfriend, he calls me his boat girlfriend. Not his love. His boat love. I think it's funny. 

"You're afraid of not breathing?" I asked before derisively laughing at him, "Ha! Not I. I have no fear of not breathing." 

That's not entirely true but with regard to the water, it is. Very long ago, I knew, that I will my safety to the water when I am around it. If it does decree i stop breathing, then i stop breathing. I don't feel this level of comfort about any other concept of death, not at all, but around and in the water, I can accept that I don't control how much and until when I may breathe. I love Bukowski but I think he may have been wrong, it is not best to die at the hands of a lover, but at the hands of what you love with irredeemable, irrational delusion; something that is big enough to you that even as it kills you, it doesn't feel possible to lose your love for it, only to accept that it must have its reason and I need not know it. Perhaps that is why so many people accept death as the will of god, but in the absence of a figure I can deify, I look for that sentiment in lakes that may swallow me whole and men who kick me onto the floor. It just amuses me to watch one of my gods fear the other. 

Later in the evening we sat in the little garden in front of our little cottage in this little town that is no more than a faded mile-marker on the highway that most people thoughtlessly drive by on the way to bigger, brighter places. I'm always surprised by the places I like, and I have no idea what system of measurement I use to decide. The last two years i spent in a beautiful valley-town surrounded by snow-clad mountains, I hated it. I moved to a loud temple-town where I was once attacked by goons, the police and a troop of monkeys all in the same week, and I don't hate it. The terrible, dirty, polluted, unsafe, corrupt centre of civilization that I consider my home, I should hate it, but I can't. This little hamlet in the middle of a deeply polarized state surrounded by a lake on one side and the promise of progress on the other, I love it. I don't know why. Maybe it's just because it rained the day I arrived here. That seems to be common to every place I've ever loved. 

As we sat on big armchairs over soil where there should have been grass, I told him i couldn't wait much longer until I had to fulfill my dream of living on a boat. I really must, I have always wanted to, and then one day while reading Anais Nin I learnt that she too, on a whim, lived in a houseboat for a while, and i truly felt, even though she lived and died before my time, that she had somehow stolen that essence of me from the future. As the night wore he seemed to grow tired of my endless discourse about various kinds of water bodies and how I was going to live in all of them, he walked me in the bedroom as I chattered on about boats and the men who are afraid of them. 

As soon as he dimmed the lights, a shattering realisation dawned over me, that happens sometimes; sometimes you only get a second to learn, internalise and process the fact that something terrible is about to happen to your body. Admittedly it's thrilling to live with someone who can turn on you at any moment, and I think he likes it too; he sends me signals, as if his words couldn't reach me over the vastness of the expanse he demands there exist between us, by dimming lights, taking off his watch or stroking my cheek. It's never said but I always know once second before it's coming, the world recedes from under my feet, to prepare me for the wave that shall soon crash against my entire being and debilitate me. 

The wave came in the form of kick to my hip, and  as I fell I could see him unbuckling his belt. I think maybe my favourite kind of beating is one that is indiscriminate and unexplained, and belts are rather amenable to that. His blows gave no clues as to where they may land next and if he did say any words, they didn't lend any information as to *why*. *Why* was I lying on the floor, hugging myself? There is no answer to that, is there? And if there is, it is one of those things that I accept I don't need to know. You can really only swim in the pain if you don't question its depths, because the moment you do, it's too terrifying. 

He pulled me up off the floor and threw me onto the bed, it's much lower than our bed back home, and I felt like I was falling much longer than I am used to. He sat over me, holding my wrists over my stomach, and slapping me with the back of his hand on the right, and the front of it on the left. I struggled to breathe under his weight, and the little pockets of time in between blows weren't enough to catch my breath, so I took deep breaths through my mouth instead. During one of those open-mouthed breaths his hand landed against my jaw so hard, something terrible happened on the other side. There are few evils as horrid as an open-mouthed slapped. My hand flew up to my face and a single tear fell out of my right eyes. 

"Did you get...hurt?" He asked holding my cheek within his palm like a mad-man, "Who the fuck told you that you had the freedom to be injured?" 

The madness. Good god, the madness. It's only with a deity that you'd consider your injury its will and your fault. The sheer unreasonableness of the things he says, harsh enough to seem so abusive, make me love him like nothing else. You never feel more powerless than when you're held responsible for things that are completely out of your control. 

"I'm sorry," I whispered out of the pout his fingers had crafted with their force, "I didn't mean to get injured." 

"Perhaps you don't deserve to breathe," he said, covering my nose and my mouth with his hand, "Don't even try." 

For a while it was okay, for a while it always feels okay to hold your breath, but the panic sets in so quickly. I started to thrash and wriggle, but each time he only held my airways shut even harder, refusing to allow me even a moment of respite until I calmed down and stayed still, and then he'd give me a second. A second in which he expected that any breath I had left be used to express gratitude for his generosity. Rather like the gods I was taught growing up, self-important and unforgiving. 

"Please, please let me breathe," I panted even as his hands came down on my mouth and nose once again. 

"No, you will not breathe," he said, pressing down hard enough to alert me of the injury that wasn't going anywhere. 

I didn't breathe, well, i couldn't but I like to believe at least part of me was accepting this drowning as a will bigger than my own, even if it's a will of my own creation. As the panic set in once again my legs wriggled and thrashed of their own volition, and my hands tried to push his hand off my mouth to little avail. 

"What's wrong?" He asked squeezing my face into his palm and laughing as his most derisive, "Are you afraid of not breathing?"