Balloons

She holds my head in her lap and tells me to breathe deeply. People are running inside my chest, big men, hurdling, running and jumping and thumping down on my ribs. I am filled with athletes and my arms are locked and rigid over my chest. She tells me "breathe", and I take a halting breath that is half a sob and I smell her secret musky odour under the sweet floral perfume, and it makes me even more agitated.

I am the gnarled and gnomic Rumpelstiltskin from the fairytale. I am all spit and struggle. She is a part of the problem offering a solution. She is the vessel for my lust and I fill her up. She kisses my tears and I could love her or I could hit her and I am bouncing from one state to the next like someone leaping from rock to rock in an ice-capped stream.

"Imagine," she tells me, "that for every breath there is a balloon filling."

Balloons. She has learned this trick in one of her self-help sessions. I feel my chest tightening at the use of this ridiculous self-delusion. I have lived with her affirmations pinned to the wall in the toilet, tolerating her silent platitudes for the sake of her extraordinary beauty. Now she hugs me and I struggle away from her.

"Release the balloons," she tells me, "one by one." Someone elses words from her ripe, over-blown mouth. Her mouth that I have bitten. Her mouth that I have pressed my nipple against, a mouth that has never sullied itself against my vagina. Her perfect mouth.

The balloons slip from my fingers one by one.

When they are gone, floating off into the angry pale of the sky. There is nothing left for me to hold on to.

I roll out of her empty hug and I am gone. I have already left the room.

"That's right," she tells me, "let go of the balloons, one by one by one."

One by one by one and it is all gone. I am gone. She is gone. There is nothing left to hold onto and my chest eases out of the vice that has gripped it. I leave the room. I leave the house. I leave that life. And I am gone.