The Space I Take

I was sitting at the table

and everyone was talking

and my chest forgot how to breathe right.

Not a panic attack that looks like a panic attack,

but the kind where you're still smiling

and taking notes

and acting like your lungs are working

when actually they're collapsing

into themselves like origami.

I wanted to dissolve into the chair.

I wanted the chair to absorb me.

I wanted to be anywhere

except in this chair

at this table

with all these eyes

and all these mouths

and all this evidence

that I exist and I'm visible

and I'm taking up space

that someone else could use better.

The man to my left was talking about projections.

The woman across from me was nodding.

No one noticed that I had stopped being fully present,

that I was only about seventy percent real,

that the other thirty percent of me

was trying to figure out how to leave my body

without actually leaving the room.

I didn't raise my hand to ask questions.

I didn't excuse myself to the bathroom.

I just sat there

in my chair

in my body

taking up oxygen

that felt like it didn't belong to me.

The meeting kept going.

My breathing kept stuttering.

The space I took up kept existing

whether I wanted it to or not.

By the end I was mostly present again.

My lungs remembered their job.

The chair was just a chair.

But I had spent ninety minutes

wishing I could be nowhere,

which is not the same as wishing I could be dead,

but it's the same door with a different name.

It's wanting to disappear

the way a person disappears when the lights go out.

Not gone.

Just unseen.

Just taking up space that no one has to acknowledge.