Excuse Me While I Breathe

Sometimes, when I get involved in a longer conversation, I forget to breathe when I talk.

I'll have a thought that I'm trying to express - in the long-winded, rambling way of speaking that I excel at - and some internal note in my mind cries, "DON'T STOP FOR BREATH OR YOU'LL FORGET YOUR WHOLE POINT!!!!" I certainly don't want that to happen, since I've spent the last 5 minutes trying to get set up to share that whole point, so I listen to my misguided brain.

It's like I think that if I stop to take a breath before an intended stop or break in my sentence, I'll never be able to talk again.

 Is that silly?

I think it is. Irrational, at the very least. Deadly, at the very most. What if one day I decide to say the longest sentence ever created, and I never stop to breathe in the middle of it? (I even refused to breath as I typed that line...it's encroaching on my mental thoughts now, too!)

It's a dangerous game I'm playing.

It's been a particular problem lately. I find that the more serious or in-depth the conversation is, the worse I get at breathing. And I've had quite a few in-depth, long conversations with my roommates in the last 2 weeks, getting to know them a little more.

I've also just gotten over a lousy cold, which moved from a very stuffy nose down to an ugly, hacking cough. It all moved through my body in the course of a week, but the remnants of the cough have held on for dear life.

And when I pushed myself to the limit of not breathing, trying to eke out the last words of a very important sentence about elephants being tied for my 3rd favorite animal in the world, it causes me to swallow and take a fake, half-breath. The swallow and breathing at the same time makes for a strange experience in my throat - cue coughing, trying to breathe, and coughing like my life depends upon it. For about 5 minutes.

So instead of my roommates continuing their interest in my ranking of favorite animals of the world,  they just think I'm crazy because I end every thought with a hacking cough. And because I can't finish telling them that the star-nosed mole rounds out the top 20, the topic switches to something silly, like what our famillies are like or what our hobbies are. Like those are good conversations to get to know someone by.

Maybe that's why my room's in the basement now.