By Priyanuj Mazumdar

I start smoking a month after my lungs collapse. A month after my left lung shrinks to half the size of the right, like our love. It still pumps air, gives the illusion of working—but just like us, it struggles in the dark. I never lit a cigarette the first eighteen years of my life. But days after I’m discharged from the hospital, I smoke cigarette after cigarette after cigarette until it kisses my lips more than you ever do. My lungs failed me. Maybe I am just taking revenge.

Like every relationship doomed to collapse, the poison in my lungs starts to spread long before I realize. Hiding, invading, destroying me. It’s not until so much air has infiltrated the space between my lung and chest wall that breathing becomes a chore. The night I am hospitalized, doctors tell me what’s wrong. They call it pneumothorax. I call it irony.

Of course, we love each other. You are my first love. I am your first, second, third—who cares? Our love is beautiful, bewitching, earnest. Sure, it’s a mismatch from the beginning—you a raging goth and recovering alcoholic, I a hardcore metalhead and suicidal virgin. But for a year and three months, we make it work. You move schools for me. I move sleep schedules for you. We stay up all night talking on the phone, then glue ourselves together all day in school. We make the city our memory garden, planting our love all over town. Even now, I can’t go to that cramped restaurant around the corner from your house that serves the best pork fry, or the park where we first kissed, or the café that serves the best masala chai—without thinking of you.

The evening that changes us forever, we talk about drowning. The floods that wash over Assam every year, submerging and wiping out people like they never existed, have begun. I ask what you would do if you were drowning. You have taken swimming lessons all your life—you will wade through the water and glide to the shore. Simple. When you ask me, I have no answer. But I have breaking news. I’m getting hospitalized tonight. Breaking news because it starts breaking us apart, slowly and inevitably sinking us.

***

From getting into my father’s car to walking the steps into the hospital to lying on a tiny bed in a tiny room to injection, wheelchair, dimly lit emergency ward, hysterical voices, big fat masked figure in a scrub suit, big fat needle, cold, cold skin, screaming, screaming—it’s one gigantic blur. I’ve never spent a night at the hospital before, let alone the emergency ward. Not since the night I came out of my mother’s womb.

The blinding glare from the operating lights fails to distract me from the needle breaking and entering my skin. For the next few minutes, my body isn’t mine. The doctor takes control, the nurses take my blood, I take a thin tube that goes deep into my chest. Attached to the tube is a transparent container meant to drain out excess air and fluids from my right lung, bringing it back to its original size. For a couple of weeks now, every breath I take is accompanied by a sharp pain, like there’s someone sitting at the bottom of my lungs punching me anytime air passes through.

More injections. Repeated invasion of my body without permission. Then a lung exerciser with green, yellow, and red balls inside plastic chambers—each requiring increasing force to move. I blow into the connected pipe, but my lungs can only spawn enough force to move one ball. One out of three. Even probability isn’t on my side.

My father hand-feeds me dinner—some rice, some dal, some vegetable curry, a whole lot of love. No flavor in the hospital food. I blame my tastebuds for being demanding. Halfway through, I start weeping—the first time in front of my father since I was a baby—burying my head on his shoulders, turning a patch of his sky-blue cotton shirt navy, flooding the entire hospital with my tears.

Don’t go, I say.

I am not going anywhere, he says, and then walks away.

I’m alone in the pitch-dark. I know he wants to stay. I know he can’t stay. Visits to the emergency ward are restricted to five minutes at a time, but at night, when you need someone the most, you are on your own. When I don’t sleep the entire night, staring at the clock staring at me, I curse him. The entire world has gone to bed. Mine holds me captive. I miss my bed. I miss you. I miss my family. I don’t know when I’ll be out of here. I don’t know yet that there is no going back to how it used to be. My lungs will never be the same. You and I will never be the same.

***

Under the CT scanner, bright lights shine down, narrow beams of radiation pass through, and I enter afterlife. My days at the hospital have started to blend now, but when I feel your touch, I open my eyes. You are here. You are actually here. Sitting on my pathetic hospital bed—my home now. I eat here, sleep here, shit here, cry here. You are in tears. I want to tell you don’t cry, the hospital’s flooding already. You hold my hand like I am dirty. I hold yours. If it means you will stay with me. You haven’t brought me flowers, though this feels like my funeral.

You know I love you, right? you say.

Please don’t go.

I can’t wait to see you again. In the real world.

You leave, leaving me behind. Like this isn’t the real world. This isn’t real life. My pain isn’t real. The waking nights I spend flooding my bed aren’t real. The container filling with fluid from my body isn’t real. Being tied to this bed for the last three days isn’t real. The fact that I would forget how to walk in the next few days isn’t real. I am only real when not infected with this disease.

Love at eighteen is intense, obsessive, compulsive. The day you tell me I’m suffocating you, I undergo surgery. Tell you to wait until my body is stitched together. You say our operation hours are over. You are so certain, so immovably convinced, that it has taken me a decade to understand that we never belonged together. I avoid hospitals like I avoid love now. But I find you in my shadows, in my shame, in the crevices of the scars you opened in me. I admit I underestimated the size of the wounds you inflicted—this infection is no one’s fault but mine. That’s what happens when you use a cheap Band-Aid to treat scars that need surgical stitches. 

***

In the emergency ward, the world passes by. Not in a ghost-like timelapse. Slow motion, painstakingly forcing my attention to every tiny movement. Nurses change shifts, doctors pause visiting hours, my parents take turns staying the night, you change your Facebook status from If you believe in God, please pray for my boyfriend to Isn’t Robert Pattinson hot. I lie somewhere between lifelessness and death, craving the life these underpaid nurses live, a life I would scoff at otherwise. The wall clock hanging over me teaches the illusion of time. I close my eyes, half an hour has passed, open, it’s been five minutes. Maybe you’re right. This isn’t real life. This is a trial. And I’m not prepared.

Insomnia is a devil I have bedded for months. But it’s one thing to stay up all night on a bed you call your own, another to be sleepless on a bed that holds you hostage. When the clock strikes twelve and a new day beckons, my mind goes berserk. There are so many things I haven’t done. So many chances I haven’t taken. So much time I have wasted and blamed procrastination. In the real world, time only existed when I wanted it to. But here, it’s all-consuming. I am just eighteen, I have all the time in the world. That’s what I have been telling myself. But if I were to die here, if I were to never see the world again, I would perish without leaving a trace of my existence. Like the people wiped away by the floods every year. Stop, someone make this stop.

On the bed beside me, one of only three, a little girl snores away. I overheard the doctor telling the nurses earlier about a lung transplant. This girl, eight or nine at most, has barely seen any life at all. And her lungs have failed her already. At least my lungs had the decency to warn me. Hers have forsaken her with the kind of cruelty that God-fearing people fail to explain. When I ask her if she goes to school, she lights up. When I ask her the name of her best friend, she lights up. When I ask her what she wants to do when she grows up, the answer is at the tip of her tongue: doctor. She has the kind of assurance brilliant people carry in their pockets. She asks me when she gets to go back home. Soon, I say. I am a liar. The doctors are liars. The nurses are liars. My father is a liar. My mother is a liar. You are a liar. Fooling me day in, day out, telling me it’s just one more day.

When I am moved to the general ward four days later, I don’t feel any different. Except I miss you more. The only marker of time is the steady increase in my desperation to see you again. You comply, then, holding my hand, tell me you wish you were in my place so people would flock to see you. Like this is a museum and I am a damaged painting. It’s not just you.

My mother guards me like I am three again, washes me, bathes me, watches over me. My shame refuses to drain with the dirty water flowing from my body. When the doctor tears apart my skin again, invades my body again, my mother stays silent. When the doctor delivers his verdict—no probable cause for this suffering, like there ever is—she stays silent. When I ask her why this is happening to me, she stays silent. I don’t ask her questions anymore.

***

A month has gone by in the confines of these dull, dingy blue walls. No, a week. I have been glued to my bed, every little toss and turn felt in my bones, parts of me exposed to strangers I don’t even let myself see. My shame is poked again and again and again by trained hands from morning to night—for everything that goes in and comes out of my body. But when I finally get up and take my first step, my legs don’t work. My lungs have conspired with the rest of my body. I slip on the completely waterlogged floor, falling on my back. It’s okay, everyone around me says, pity on their faces, cheering me on like I am a toddler.

In the bathroom, a sigh of relief accompanies my first moment of privacy, and when I catch a peep of life outside from the old, dirty window—everything fades away. The window is bleary, my vision foggy, but never have I seen things so clearly. Life feels like life again. On the drive home, I watch the world through the car window like a dog—panting, smiling, oblivious to human misery. My joy is short-lived. The medical bill drowns my father, and I don’t meet his gaze for weeks after. Why couldn’t I have just taken swimming lessons?

In my bedroom, in the bed which has held me together for ten years, I prepare for recovery. My back doesn’t hurt anymore. Time doesn’t hurt anymore. Life doesn’t hurt anymore. Sure, my body still aches in places. Sure, I still feel dirty in the places marked by stitches. But I can talk to you now. Smile with you now. Fight with you now. Love and cry with you now. You tell me my pain is nothing. So many people have gone through so much worse. Look at you bitching and whining, you say. You are not wrong. What are seven days in the throes of anguish compared to a lifetime of suffering? I don’t say anything. It’s only when you call me a crybaby that I stop crying. My tears dry out. For days and months and years. On my balcony, I am about to light my first cigarette. I bought a pack on my way home. Then I remember the little girl who needed new lungs.

***

I hold the pre- and post-surgery X-rays of my lungs to the tube light. My right lung isn’t the same size as the left. It will never be. My love for future lovers will always be a size smaller than my love for you. Breathing doesn’t hurt anymore, but when I press against the scars that bear witness to my weakness, the pain resurfaces. The doctor who detected my disease sends my father a text message: Thank God we got your son into the hospital on time. Who knows what could have happened if we had waited a few more days. Something chokes me, but I don’t cry. I don’t tell you about it either. I swallow it like I swallow everything now. I am not going to flood someone else’s bed just because mine is uninhabitable. I smoke my first cigarette, then another, until I cough up blood, until my lungs burn like our love. Everything is going to change, but cigarettes will stay with me.

Two months later, you break up with me. Two years later, I fall out of love with you. Two years too late. We were outliers, you and me. Turning eyerolls and frowns and sneers and laughs into fuel for our love. And boy did our love go up in flames. I have had my heart broken several times in the ten years since. People have loved me, left me, sunk me, over and over and over. But since the night you called me a crybaby, I haven’t shed a single tear. I guess I have something to thank you for after all. I still smoke, searching for the reason why my lungs failed me, why you left me. Maybe I am taking revenge on myself for loving you.

~~~

Priyanuj Mazumdar is a writer, editor, and educator from northeast India whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Los Angeles Review, Allium, NonBinary Review, Harbor Review, BULL,and elsewhere. He has received support from the Nadine B. Andreas Endowment and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. He was shortlisted for the Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration and featured in HellBound Books’ Anthology of Extreme Horror. Find more on his website http://priyanujmazumdar.com/ and his socials @whoispriyanuj.