Just Breathe

by Cammie McGovern

  He’s talking too fast. His enthusiasm becomes a coughing spell that lasts almost a minute. Not the worst I’ve seen, but it takes the wind out of his sails.

  “Stop overachieving?”

  “How did you know?” He smiles and spits what he’s just coughed up into a washcloth beside his bed. “It’s crazy, Jamie, but they’ve got all this research to back it up. They’ve done a bunch of studies, and they all say some version of the same thing: after your basic needs are met, having money doesn’t make anyone happier. In fact, your happiness level goes down slightly after you make a million dollars. Success doesn’t affect the level, either. You want to know the only thing that really works?”

  I don’t answer. He’s on such a roll, I don’t need to.

  “Making a habit of optimistic, positive thinking. You have to train your brain not to see things negatively by replacing those thoughts with positive ones. I know it sounds a little simplistic. I was skeptical when I first started reading all this, but the more I research, the more sense it makes to me, and I really think this is what I’m meant to be doing. I’ve finally found it! This is my project.”

  I look down at the books. “Thinking positively is your project?”

  “Yes, but it’s harder than you think. There’s a book based on the class, and it lets you pick different exercises. This is mine.” He opens the drawer again and pulls out a green plastic box with index cards inside. “I’m writing down quotes. Five a day. Enough that I can forget them, and my second exercise will be pulling them out and re-reading them. Here’s one: ‘To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.’”

  He lays a stack of maybe fifty cards on his rolling table. I reach over and pick one up: “‘The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they’re gone.’”

  “See, I love that one.”

  I put it back on his table. “Okay.”

  “Why? You don’t?”

  “No—it’s just—it’s nothing. I’m not much of an aphorism person.”

  “These aren’t aphorisms. Do they seem like aphorisms to you?”

  I pick up another one and read it: “‘Most people are as happy as they make up their mind to be.’ Yeah, that sounds like an aphorism to me.”

  “These are quotations from famous writers on the greatest question every human being faces: How can I be happier? Aphorisms are stupid posters like ‘Hang in there, Baby’ and ‘A smile is a frown turned upside down.’”

  “The guidance counselor at my middle school actually had that on the wall.”

  “I know. I had the same guidance counselor. She was an idiot.”

  DAVID

  I don’t understand. I expected my friends to roll their eyes and make fun of this, but I thought Jamie would love it. This is my own project. My own special study, like the ones she got to do with her dad. Only this isn’t about art, it’s the question I’ve been asking myself for the last month: If I have just a few years left—too long for a bucket list, but not long enough for a family or career like everyone else—what will make me happiest?

  To me, reading these books makes a ton of sense.

  To her, it doesn’t.

  “These aren’t idiotic, David. They’re just—I don’t know. Never mind. It’s a good project. It is.”

  “But you think it’s stupid.”

  “No, I don’t think it’s stupid. Yes, I think it’s a little simplistic, that’s all. I’m not sure positive thinking works the way people want it to.”

  “This is the crazy part, though—it does work. The research shows it. If you do the exercises and put the effort in, it really does work. You should try it. I could lend you some of my cards.”

  I don’t know why I’m pushing it. I’ve been working on this project and for a week I’ve wanted to tell her, I thought I was dying, and then I remembered what you said. Find a project for yourself. It’s worked. The more I read and write down quotes, the more I want to learn about all this. I’m not thinking about my lungs or my infection or the sorry state of my body. I’m lying here in bed, just as sick as I was last week, and I’m genuinely happier.

  I haven’t told anyone else because this feeling is fragile and one eye roll might kill it. I’m telling Jamie because I assumed she’d understand.

  But no. She stares at the chunk of cards I’m holding out. She doesn’t want to take them, I can tell.

  JAMIE

  I understand why he thinks I’d like this. Last week, I told him he needed to think more positively, to picture a future where he isn’t so sick.

  Now I don’t want to touch his stupid cards.

  “No, thanks, David,” I say softly. “I’ll stick with origami for now.”

  I try to keep my voice light, but I feel my face get red and my hands get clammy. I’m not going to turn this into an argument where I have to explain, I was talking about something different. “Get happy” talk and positive thinking feels like bullshit to someone who’s been depressed. It says it’s your fault for not being able to think cheerful thoughts. It makes everything worse.

  He takes his cards back. “Okay, never mind.”

  He looks hurt.

  “David, I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. It’s not for everybody. I understand.”

  He can’t look at me, which makes it even worse.

  “I should probably get going. My mom is waiting for me.” I’ve never used this excuse before because I’ve never wanted to leave his room before.

  “Sure, yeah, okay. Will I see you tomorrow?”

  He’s never asked this question because I always come.

  “Why?”

  “It’s your regular shift, right?”

  “Oh, right. Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  In the year and a half since my father died, I’ve tried to make sense of his sadness.

  “Making art was the only thing he ever wanted to do,” my mom has told me. “He wasn’t depressed because you left him to go to school. He was depressed because he never became the artist he wanted to be.”

  What neither one of us ever says is: I’m not becoming the one I wanted to be, either.

  I loved all those years of painting with my dad, and I loved the year I got to take art class in middle school. I loved being chosen for a citywide art show downtown, where representatives from every grade got to display work around city hall. The assignment had been to choose a favorite children’s story from childhood and reimagine new illustrations for it. I’d picked The Runaway Bunny because the story always fascinated me and the illustrations always confused me. In my version, I played with perspective, putting the baby bunny on adventures in the foreground and the mama bunny in the distance, keeping an eye on him. My teacher loved it; my dad, not so much.

  “I thought they didn’t start telling you to be a children’s book illustrator until you got into art school, but I was wrong, I guess. Nowadays they start in middle school.”

  Something happened after that show. It wasn’t just what he said about the assignment. It was his silence when I brought home all my other work from that semester. Work that had gotten lavish praise from the teacher, who told me I should explore all the mediums before choosing one to pursue.

  “You’re a bit of a Michelangelo,” she said, smiling. “You could probably do any of them.”

  I knew she didn’t mean I had his talent; she meant I was good at drawing and painting and maybe sculpture. For weeks, her words floated around in my mind. I’d done work at school that year that I really liked. Pieces that were different from anything I’d done at home with my dad. I was excited for him to see them. I even worried that he might go overboard and get sentimental.

  You did all this without me? I imagined him saying, and I would rush in to reassure him.

  You’re still part of this. Your voice is always in the back of my head. Which was true. I thought we might cr
y and hug and reassure each other while he looked over everything.

  But no. He flipped through the portfolio quickly and for a long time didn’t say anything at all. Finally, he closed it up and said, “Looks like you’re moving on.”

  The next semester, I didn’t sign up for art. I wanted my dad to know that I wasn’t moving on—he was my first and most important teacher. I’d go to school for academics, and I’d learn art from him.

  Except he hardly worked anymore. On weekends, he’d go downstairs to his studio in the basement for only an hour or two. Over the summer, it got worse. He hardly went down at all. We took none of our old field trips to museums and art shows. Instead, we both went quiet. Some mornings, my mother left for work and we retreated to separate corners of the house, not saying a word until she came home.

  At the time, I was confused.

  Now I understand: This is what depression looks and feels like. Silence. Stillness. Torpor. David’s talk about foregoing college to pursue his “happiness research” feels like he’s taken the idea of being homeschooled and gleaned the wrong lesson from it. He thinks learning and doing what he wants will mean being happy. I haven’t told him about the last year of my dad’s life. How I still believe he would have been better off if he’d taken the job teaching art at our community college when it was offered instead of refusing it because he “didn’t want any distractions.” Having no responsibilities meant he accomplished nothing.

  In this past year, I’ve done no art at all, and instead I’ve embraced my mother’s philosophy: work hard, do your job, think about other people. So far my mom has been right. Even friendless and overwhelmed at school, I’ve been happier this year than I was last year. But how do I tell David that without telling him everything else?

  The next day I stand at the foot of David’s bed with my cart at my side. I’ve been awake half the night trying to figure out what I want to say.

  “I’m sorry I was weird yesterday about your happiness project. I have a problem with depression, and the idea that you can control your mood with upbeat sayings—I don’t know. It pissed me off.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t. If you don’t know depression, I can’t explain it, but it’s bigger than that. Deciding to be cheerful or think positively doesn’t help. It makes it worse actually.”

  It’s strange—I’m not as nervous as I expected to be. My heart isn’t hammering; I don’t feel dizzy the way I did yesterday when he talked about this.

  “I’m doing better now, because I’m on medication, but it’s not like that’s a miracle cure. I still have to think about it. I’m always worried that it’ll come back.”

  He nods but doesn’t say anything. I can tell he’s listening.

  Tell the truth, I think. “Sometimes I feel okay, and sometimes I’m not sure. I still do weird things that I can’t always explain. Like eating lunch by myself in the cafeteria and storming out of here yesterday. I don’t always have reasons why I do certain things.”

  “When you have a genetic disorder where the odds are pretty good that you’ll die at some point before you hit thirty, you have some idea of what depression probably feels like. It’s not the same, I know, but things can feel pretty bleak sometimes.”

  I think about our phone call when he was feverish and sick.

  David keeps going: “Would it make you want to storm out of here if I told you about one more thing I read in my happiness research?”

  I smile. “It depends, I guess.”

  “It turns out the country with the highest happiness index is Denmark, of all places, where it’s winter eight months a year. The reason is this concept they have called hue-guh.” He opens his laptop so I can see how it’s spelled: hygge. “It’s crazy. The spelling, not the idea. The idea is that real happiness is about simplifying your life so you can see what’s right in front of you and find happiness there.” He points to his lap and then widens his hands so it’s clear, he doesn’t mean his lap, he means here, in this room. What’s right in front of us.

  “Here? In the hospital?” I say.

  “Well, no, actually not right here. The lighting is too fluorescent to be hygge in here, but the point is that you look at your life as it is. You learn to savor what you already have. You don’t need to apply to colleges and go someplace where you won’t recognize anyone or know yourself. Happiness is where you feel at home. Most people already have the components for happiness. They just have to realize it.”

  “Like stop and smell the roses?”

  “Yeah, sort of. Hygge is usually described as the feeling you get when you’re curled up in front of a fireplace with a cup of hot cocoa and there’s a snowstorm raging outside. It’s about atmosphere, and coziness, but it’s also about the storm, too. I think it’s really about finding pockets of comfort in the face of hard times. Where you defy the shitty elements in your life and be happy in spite of them.”

  He looks at me like there’s something more he wants to say but isn’t sure he should. He coughs. Then he must decide to go ahead, because he closes his laptop. “I’m telling you all this because I wanted to say that your visits and folding origami and watching movies and everything we’ve done—they’ve given me some hygge here in the hospital. Thank you for that.”

  I feel my throat tighten. I want to tell him the truth—that if I didn’t have these visits to look forward to, I don’t know how I’d make it through the loneliness of school right now. I wouldn’t. It’s what I couldn’t tell my mother when she told me I shouldn’t visit him so much, because I can’t say this to anyone. If I didn’t have David, I wonder how bleak and friendless this fall would have felt.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” I say. “You really don’t.”

  “Okay, then. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I want to ask you a favor. A big favor. Promise you won’t say no right away.”

  “Okay.”

  He claps his hands and rubs them together. “I’ve been in this hospital for over a month now, my longest stay ever, and you can certainly testify to the fact that I probably started losing my mind about four weeks ago, am I right?”

  I can’t tell where this is headed or if I’m meant to agree with him or not.

  He keeps going. “If you’re talking about someone’s psychological health, I’m guessing that pretty much the worst thing you can do is confine them to a hospital bed in a room by themselves and then wake them up every three hours to find out how they’re doing. It’s not waterboarding, but it’s close.”

  I nod. Even my mom would admit this is true.

  “So here’s my idea”—he leans forward to whisper—“I need to get out of here. Not a full-on escape. Just a mini escape. For an hour or two. You bring clothes for me to wear. I change downstairs in a bathroom. I put them on, and you and I go outside. We breathe real air again. Maybe we even get real food. I’m talking about two hours tops. No one will even know I’m gone.”

  “I can’t, David. I can’t violate hospital rules like that.”

  “Jamie, listen to me. We’re sitting here talking about depression, and I’m lying here every day trying to keep it away. I need to breathe fresh air and taste real food and eat with a utensil that isn’t plastic. I need to feel like a person again, not a patient. I’ll never get better if I can’t remember what better feels like. I’ve been here more than four weeks. I know it sounds melodramatic, but I feel like I’ll die if I don’t get out of here. I can’t say this to anyone else, Jamie, but I can tell you.”

  Now I’m not looking away, and he isn’t, either.

  “I have a four-hour window. My IV antibiotics happen twice a day, morning and late afternoon. Each one takes about three hours. What I do in between is up to me. Last week, the doctors gave me permission to leave the peds wing during the day to go somewhere quieter and do my homework, as long as I stay in certain areas of the hospital. They’ll assume I’m downstairs in a conference room working.”

  We look at each other long enough f
or me to read his face. I don’t know what to do. I love that he seems so energetic and upbeat about this idea. He’s right—it makes him seem healthier. I want to believe he is, but I know it’s not true. No doctor would say he’s well enough to leave the hospital. But they have said he’s well enough to leave his room. To leave the wing.

  I take a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll help you, but only with some conditions. We’re not going more than a block away from the hospital. We need to be able to get back here quickly if anything happens. That gives us one restaurant to choose from.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “It’s Denny’s,” I say. “You won’t have to eat with plastic forks. Take it or leave it.”

  “It sounds great.” He grins. The biggest smile I’ve seen in a long time.

  “It won’t be great, but it’s not far from the side exit where we can leave without attracting attention. You’ll also need clothes obviously. Do you have any here?”

  “Just T-shirts and pajama pants.”

  “Can you ask Eileen to bring you something?”

  “She wouldn’t mind breaking rules, but she’d probably tell our parents as part of making her point that I’m not perfect.”

  I’m not sure what other choice we have. “I guess I could bring you some of my dad’s clothes. Even though we moved, my mom saved most of them. I’m not sure why. She just couldn’t bear to give them away.”

  “Is that okay?”

  “Not really, but we’ll be careful, and I’ll bring them back. She doesn’t need to know.”

  “Thank you, Jamie.” He holds out his hand the way he did the first day he was in the hospital, when I came back to check on him.

  He wants me to come over and take it. He can do things like this—hold hands with someone who isn’t his girlfriend—because he’s older and confident and doesn’t think holding hands is a big deal. But if you’re me, and you’ve never held anyone’s hand—if you’ve spent too much of your life being homeschooled or depressed—it’s a big deal. It is.