Jade McGlynn Poet Spoken Word

Breathless

It started like a whisper,
A small drag of air,
A stutter in my lungs.

Nothing at first.
Just a strange weight,
A slow squeeze,
A quiet hand closing around my throat.
Then it grew.

The whisper turned to claws.
Air slipped further away.
My chest locked up like a fist.
I tried to stand,
But my legs weren’t legs anymore,
Just numb things that didn’t know how to hold me.

My eyes—gone.
Vision shrinking to tunnels,
Then static,
Then darkness blooming at the edges.
The room spinning,
As if the world itself was letting go of me.

And in that moment
I thought—
This is it.
This is how people die.
Not with warning,
But with a slow, invisible theft of something you thought was yours forever:
Breath.

My heart was a drum
Beating panic into my skull.
My hands trembled,
Reaching for nothing.
The air felt like knives
I couldn’t swallow.

And then the hospital.
Doors swinging open like a mouth ready to eat me whole.
Bright lights.
Shouting voices.
Machines beeping like alarms.
Every sound a hammer against my skull.

I am autistic,
And hospitals feel like battles.
Too bright.
Too loud.
Too much.
Every antiseptic smell tugging at memories I’ve tried to bury.
Memories of pain,
Fear,
Of not being believed,
Of not being safe.

And here I was again,
Caught between two terrors:
The terror of my body shutting down,
And the terror of this place that’s supposed to save me.

I wanted to scream,
But my voice was gone.
I wanted to run,
But my legs were stone.
I wanted to breathe,
But the air wouldn’t come.

I thought I might not get back up this time.
This might be it.
This is what it feels like to die:
Not a clean ending,
But a slow fading
While the world stays too bright,
Too loud,
Too close.

And then—oxygen.
Hands on me.
A mask.
Voices blurring but steady.
Air forcing its way back in.
My lungs burning as life crawled back,
Claw by claw.

I lived.
I’m here.
But the fear stayed.
It sits in my ribs now,
A ghost of that night.
Every inhale reminding me how thin the thread is,
Between living and not,
Between standing and falling,
Between breathing and not.
And I carry that.

The breathlessness.
The brightness.
The memory of almost dying,
And the terror
That next time
I might not get another chance.

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