Breathing room

on intrusion and allowance

This picture (can be anything) gets thrown in this room. A flash of color, blur of light and shadow, a range of thought oscillating to emotion, and then back to thought, pauses at thought, at image. A quiet absolving, rendering of memory, or of the future. It has entered, not so kindly, into this room of yours. What kind of intrusion is this?

And yet, you eventually forgive, as you do, this picture accepting your forgiveness. This encounter, this merging of the world, finds ease in this room—you make an allowance this time and only this time, you promise, 答應 (dāyìng) —to let it expand into this interior, to bloat and stain this container of your keeping. To offer a ball of clay forward with palms up like an offering, of agreement and compromise. To forgive again, but it is never that simple.

“Homage to the Square: Dissolving/Vanishing,” Josef Albers, 1951

I am still not ready to meet this picture. Recently, and here it is, I step into this room and I have a decision to make. I can cause breakage, wreaking havoc, crushing this picture, shattering the pixels and watching it repair itself like a reptile. Deny, deny, deny all I want. The danger lies in that strange way the world moves with irony and proves by contrast.

One alternative: I can sit in that room and meet this picture with stillness, with a measured breath, and daring resolve to root myself to the ground, and not float right back up, as this test would lead me to think. The choice rests with me, and I make that to be my choosing. This possibility is not going anywhere. I do not question, do not judge. I repeat this, as I write: I am right here. I am right here.

At home I have a piano. Inside, this room is an anomaly. Light in light, enamored soul, it moves by exception in this other room, which is to say, it is immune to vice. I do not know what drew me closer but one day I booked a one-way ticket home and found this piano resting there by the same living room I grew up, beneath the same staircase, where I now watch. And only then do I see a tiny figure, her legs barely touching, but fluttering above, the silver petals at the bottom, light coursing down her back from the mirror, across the garden window, where the sun now clocks at 4 pm. The breeze carries over and the piano plays, blue and silent, then washes over her and now the bench lays empty.

I have not played this instrument in almost a decade. So, my mother decided to grow a garden inside this instrument; there are so many pots of leaves, and vines, all over, and water soaking mud, expansion of mass, returning the wood back to earth. It is alive, she said, the piano is alive, and it does so by a shift in weight, finished wood displacing unfinished wood, caving in with the weight, rearranging imperceptibly, the atoms firing away in quiet bursts. (The label from the Kawai Piano 2009 manual advises against placing any objects other than books or sheet music on the piano surface).

When the heart was delivered to the breathing room, I was nine. I woke up one day forgetting how to breathe. And I knew there was something other than my own heart that first grew in my mother’s womb and into my own. Rather, a heart other my own, that enjoys playing with my feelings, recalls and forgets easily, does so at what addition? At what loss? Then, I began counting my pulse. One two, one two, onetwo, onetwoonetwo.

I fasten my arms against my chest, breathing in and out, in and out, covering my pulse with my breath. I was dealt with a second heart quicker than my first; and so, I have taught myself to stay, inside this room I was dealt with, with more room for error and grace, and forgiveness. This second heart that grew closer to my brain, above my chest, closer up to my throat, which is shaped like a box, may decide, on its own terms, to become another thing. And I let it. It learns, it stills and enlarges, shrivels, changes color, camouflages and flaunts itself.

And so, I let it become—another picture inside this room.