Breathing

Namibia is a land of wide open spaces but my outside world is 10 paces.

Ten steps across a second-floor balcony. Seven shallow lunges back astride the swathe of horizon I still beneath each evening, watching the light change and the day end with the deep sigh I’ve developed in the midst of all this.

Breath.

I’m grateful to be able to draw it in.

They say that in the end that’s what kills us. The lack of the invisible often forgotten work of the lungs. They give out. They become infected, riddled, shallow and ineffectual and then the thing we have done almost secretly since birth suddenly ceases.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been told to breathe.

Inhale on a meditation mat. Exhale to relieve stress, to take a moment, pause, calm down or draw breath in rhythmically on a run. I’ve stopped those now since the news. First the ones I did on gym treadmills, next the sprints I attempted after lockdown because they suspect, in a way, coronavirus can linger in the air.

That’s why, instead, I’m breathing on the balcony.

Taking 10 paces across, seven lunges back when I recognise a walk. The swaying, slow stagger that is no less than my older brother. In the past, I’ve watched him make that uphill walk to his apartment diagonally across the street from my own with a smile and little more.

Without running to get my phone.

Not yelling excitedly that I see him and telling him to come over but not come in. Minus rummaging through a mismatch of Tupperware to unearth a once ice cream tub to give him some of the day’s food. And certainly not filling a Ziploc bag with three masks and blue surgical gloves for him and his children.

My brother’s chest had been feeling tight but not the way it’s supposed to or enough to cause him coronavirus hotline alarm.

He hadn’t replied to the last link I sent him via WhatsApp and he’s not one for social media or mass market despair so it’s good to see him walking.

It’s great to see him breathing.

By the time I’ve gathered the food, the masks and the gloves, he’s at a safe distance outside my door and we grin at each other as we navigate the hand over. My neighbour – walking by and ostensibly starved for live human interaction himself – lingers in his doorway and joins our conversation. A two-hour visit, in the gloomy shared corridor lit up by the fact that we’re a safe distance apart together.

We’re all finding various ways to breathe.

My neighbour goes for weekly walks and salutes his old haunts as he ambles by wondering when the world will open again but bracing for the worst first.

My brother works from home but was out taking my mother’s advice to get a little sun and that’s what I catch him doing as if she sent him to me.

Breathing as I take my paces.

Ten across the balcony. Seven shallow lunges back.

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