Pulmonary Rehab

The humid days are the worst.

This is what all the therapists at my Pulmonary Rehab Class are telling us. There’s more moisture in the air and that makes it heavier, harder to breathe in, harder to push out. The class, made up of roughly a dozen people, most of them twenty years older than myself, are struggling. People sit slumped, breathing hard. Scratchy, hospital towels around their neck, dixie cups full of water in their hands.

The instructor continues to lead us through our paces, but gently. Beside me a woman in a wheelchair has fallen asleep. The intimacy of that. To look over and see the flaked, yellowed skin exposed above her black socks. Her face relaxed to the point of formlessness. Her glasses smudged, fallen. What dreams now forming and dispersing within. And across the room a very elderly man, so old and thin he looks like a fledgling, has fallen asleep, too. Almost fetal in his wheelchair. And the instructor says something with her eyes, perhaps, and we all begin to exercise so gently. Nobody speaks. Everything softer, everything hushed. And as we pretend to jog in our seated places, we’ve become as silent as ninjas. As cats hunting. As clouds touching in the skies above.