Catherine Lowe
Catherine Lowe is a writer and editor, whose work has appeared in numerous well-know publications. She lives in the US and Spain.
Dare I Breathe
2014
Subway commute kit: liter of water, headphones, peppermint gum to poke my tongue around, lavender oil to huff off my wrist, a keychain of a garish frog in a bikini that my friend gave me.
Protocol: Look for someone in medical scrubs, who can help if the headphones (just headphones, no music), water, gum, lavender (is it going bad? I give the bottle a shake), or frog don’t. Look for someone with their head in their hands or between their knees. Someone who’s hungover or simply looks worse than I feel. The combination of able and miserable grounds me. Maybe I should stand up.
The trouble is I don’t breathe enough in general. I produce, engage, react, but between my anxiety, the guy behind me playing a loud game on his phone, and the girl on the seat opposite doing her full face in a mirror, contouring now, there’s no real occasion to breathe deeply and savor it.
My office has moved, this time to Times Square, 40th floor. Top of the world, again: I’ve worked in four other such buildings. Rather than contemplating the panoramas, my mind goes straight to air rights: Whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to Heaven and down to Hell. New York City real estate developers took that 13th century maxim literally, applied it greedily. My slice of heaven is a desk with a vista of an ALDO billboard, a stock ticker, and Broadway’s golden ticket, all digital, massive, and blinding. On occasion I’ve exited the building weak-eyed and clammy, Google Mapping the nearest urgent care center, where I babble to a doctor about the horror of to-die-for views, have a hot, wet cry, then head back to work.
My own apartment is on the fourth floor. It has a small room with a view of the Hudson River and the sailboats, Jet Skis, and Circle Lines that traverse it. My husband and I are in this room most of the time, windows cracked open even in winter. From the sofa we talk about the water, rarely taking our eyes off it.
2015
For vacation, we go to the end of the world. Ushuaia, Argentina, is an unfinished yet congested mess with a Hard Rock Café at its heart. Our taxi driver nicked a dog crossing the street and kept driving as he nervously complained about the now-limping animal. The town is surrounded by the Beagle Channel, whose cold, slurpy waters are the public restroom for hundreds of cormorants, budget penguins whose excrement reeks up the air. Ushuaia was built by exiled convicts in the late 19th century and retains the gloomy restlessness that must have fueled its construction.
I’m only slightly disappointed that el fin del mundo is a kind of a dump; I banished myself here willingly, after all. Its only pleasure is its post office, sitting alone on a pier on the Beagle Channel. The wood and corrugated metal shed looks proud, active, and loved. I walk in and choose a postcard and stamp to send my mother, scrawling a trite “Greetings from the end of the world!”, and dropping it in a red box. I’m thrilled when she receives it two months later, though she doesn’t pay it much mind.
Humble in size but important and cherished in its function, the post office elicits good cheer. Suddenly there’s someone you want to write to, whose address you never had to remember. Probably many mothers and fathers receive postcards from the end of the world.
2016
Japan is the last place I visit before having another urgent care meltdown in New York, this one followed by a few shaky beers with the friend who gave me the frog keychain, then two days in bed or on the sofa watching the Hudson River, shale-like in winter, and thinking it was time for a move.
On the remote island of Naoshima, Tadao Ando built a home specially for works by Claude Monet, Walter De Maria and James Turrell. Ando’s Chichu Art Museum was built partially underground to respect and preserve Naoshima’s natural features. Navigating these almost anonymous spaces, their concrete walls a low, cool breath, I hold my own, bunkered in peace.
Walking amid De Maria’s strange stage of pedestals and spheres is like finding myself in Last Year at Marienbad, albeit severely underdressed. Turrell’s Open Field is infinity, temporarily. But it was moving to see Monet’s “Water Lilies” in a space built just for them, providing them natural light, an almost real lily life, at another edge of the earth.
2018
Two weeks into living in Valencia, Spain, and I’m angry at the air. It’s suffused with a gorgeous, sweet fragrance—orange, magnolia?—and I can’t identify the source. Is someone wearing a lot, lot, lot of perfume? Is it scent branding, escaped from a hotel lobby? Did I neglect to pay an entrance fee somewhere? I stand still to case the block. It’s September, the sky a thick cerulean lid. A warm breeze lifts my hair to breathe on my neck. It’s almost indecent. I lift my face to a tree with flowers high atop its branches, inhale uninhibited joy, and am ravished for all the monk parakeets to see, even weeping afterward.
2020
I stop talking after Ahmaud Arbery, just out for a jog, is killed. Give up meditating after Breonna Taylor is killed in her sleep. George Floyd is killed while running an errand, and I want nothing more to do with the air. To share the molecules still carrying George Floyd’s “Mama!”—I’d rather not talk, or breathe, at all.
Nothing takes the edge off living on Earth. Air rights are now personally defined, the heavens filling with Blacks while anger, anguish, pain and covid hang heavily in the air below. I don’t thrive, no hobbies. A lit fuse unless sleeping.
2021
Walking-around kit in Valencia: liter of water, extra masks, notebook and pen, Luis Bunuel’s memoir (incidentally titled Mi Ultimo Suspiro), and the frog in the bikini.
Claim your space. Your body is your temple. YOLO. These expressions make sense to me now. But bucket list remains a maudlin/morbid concept that begat a travel guide industry, produced a suspiciously cheery movie starring two handsome millionaires, and generally kept the pressure on.
After the chaos of the past two years, the bucket list seems antiquated. An appropriate reframe might be: things we hope to do before Earth dies.
A few months ago I went back to New York and met friends for brunch at a restaurant near our old office. We passed 770 Broadway later as we searched for a bar. Nobody looked up at the 40th floor, we were oblivious to skyscrapers. The bar had a working jukebox and served cheap yet overpriced prosecco I felt practically honored to drink. We talked about bands we’d seen live, high fived a lot.
Our feet tapped, scaled, and slid between the rungs of the tall barstools. We ordered another glass and wondered why we never just ordered a bottle, then quickly grew disinterested in cost value or any math other than tangents. In Times Square, of all places, I took that deep breath, and lived to tell. No bucket list destination could compare.
2014
Subway commute kit: liter of water, headphones, peppermint gum to poke my tongue around, lavender oil to huff off my wrist, a keychain of a garish frog in a bikini that my friend gave me.
Protocol: Look for someone in medical scrubs, who can help if the headphones (just headphones, no music), water, gum, lavender (is it going bad? I give the bottle a shake), or frog don’t. Look for someone with their head in their hands or between their knees. Someone who’s hungover or simply looks worse than I feel. The combination of able and miserable grounds me. Maybe I should stand up.
The trouble is I don’t breathe enough in general. I produce, engage, react, but between my anxiety, the guy behind me playing a loud game on his phone, and the girl on the seat opposite doing her full face in a mirror, contouring now, there’s no real occasion to breathe deeply and savor it.
My office has moved, this time to Times Square, 40th floor. Top of the world, again: I’ve worked in four other such buildings. Rather than contemplating the panoramas, my mind goes straight to air rights: Whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to Heaven and down to Hell. New York City real estate developers took that 13th century maxim literally, applied it greedily. My slice of heaven is a desk with a vista of an ALDO billboard, a stock ticker, and Broadway’s golden ticket, all digital, massive, and blinding. On occasion I’ve exited the building weak-eyed and clammy, Google Mapping the nearest urgent care center, where I babble to a doctor about the horror of to-die-for views, have a hot, wet cry, then head back to work.
My own apartment is on the fourth floor. It has a small room with a view of the Hudson River and the sailboats, Jet Skis, and Circle Lines that traverse it. My husband and I are in this room most of the time, windows cracked open even in winter. From the sofa we talk about the water, rarely taking our eyes off it.
2015
For vacation, we go to the end of the world. Ushuaia, Argentina, is an unfinished yet congested mess with a Hard Rock Café at its heart. Our taxi driver nicked a dog crossing the street and kept driving as he nervously complained about the now-limping animal. The town is surrounded by the Beagle Channel, whose cold, slurpy waters are the public restroom for hundreds of cormorants, budget penguins whose excrement reeks up the air. Ushuaia was built by exiled convicts in the late 19th century and retains the gloomy restlessness that must have fueled its construction.
I’m only slightly disappointed that el fin del mundo is a kind of a dump; I banished myself here willingly, after all. Its only pleasure is its post office, sitting alone on a pier on the Beagle Channel. The wood and corrugated metal shed looks proud, active, and loved. I walk in and choose a postcard and stamp to send my mother, scrawling a trite “Greetings from the end of the world!”, and dropping it in a red box. I’m thrilled when she receives it two months later, though she doesn’t pay it much mind.
Humble in size but important and cherished in its function, the post office elicits good cheer. Suddenly there’s someone you want to write to, whose address you never had to remember. Probably many mothers and fathers receive postcards from the end of the world.
2016
Japan is the last place I visit before having another urgent care meltdown in New York, this one followed by a few shaky beers with the friend who gave me the frog keychain, then two days in bed or on the sofa watching the Hudson River, shale-like in winter, and thinking it was time for a move.
On the remote island of Naoshima, Tadao Ando built a home specially for works by Claude Monet, Walter De Maria and James Turrell. Ando’s Chichu Art Museum was built partially underground to respect and preserve Naoshima’s natural features. Navigating these almost anonymous spaces, their concrete walls a low, cool breath, I hold my own, bunkered in peace.
Walking amid De Maria’s strange stage of pedestals and spheres is like finding myself in Last Year at Marienbad, albeit severely underdressed. Turrell’s Open Field is infinity, temporarily. But it was moving to see Monet’s “Water Lilies” in a space built just for them, providing them natural light, an almost real lily life, at another edge of the earth.
2018
Two weeks into living in Valencia, Spain, and I’m angry at the air. It’s suffused with a gorgeous, sweet fragrance—orange, magnolia?—and I can’t identify the source. Is someone wearing a lot, lot, lot of perfume? Is it scent branding, escaped from a hotel lobby? Did I neglect to pay an entrance fee somewhere? I stand still to case the block. It’s September, the sky a thick cerulean lid. A warm breeze lifts my hair to breathe on my neck. It’s almost indecent. I lift my face to a tree with flowers high atop its branches, inhale uninhibited joy, and am ravished for all the monk parakeets to see, even weeping afterward.
2020
I stop talking after Ahmaud Arbery, just out for a jog, is killed. Give up meditating after Breonna Taylor is killed in her sleep. George Floyd is killed while running an errand, and I want nothing more to do with the air. To share the molecules still carrying George Floyd’s “Mama!”—I’d rather not talk, or breathe, at all.
Nothing takes the edge off living on Earth. Air rights are now personally defined, the heavens filling with Blacks while anger, anguish, pain and covid hang heavily in the air below. I don’t thrive, no hobbies. A lit fuse unless sleeping.
2021
Walking-around kit in Valencia: liter of water, extra masks, notebook and pen, Luis Bunuel’s memoir (incidentally titled Mi Ultimo Suspiro), and the frog in the bikini.
Claim your space. Your body is your temple. YOLO. These expressions make sense to me now. But bucket list remains a maudlin/morbid concept that begat a travel guide industry, produced a suspiciously cheery movie starring two handsome millionaires, and generally kept the pressure on.
After the chaos of the past two years, the bucket list seems antiquated. An appropriate reframe might be: things we hope to do before Earth dies.
A few months ago I went back to New York and met friends for brunch at a restaurant near our old office. We passed 770 Broadway later as we searched for a bar. Nobody looked up at the 40th floor, we were oblivious to skyscrapers. The bar had a working jukebox and served cheap yet overpriced prosecco I felt practically honored to drink. We talked about bands we’d seen live, high fived a lot.
Our feet tapped, scaled, and slid between the rungs of the tall barstools. We ordered another glass and wondered why we never just ordered a bottle, then quickly grew disinterested in cost value or any math other than tangents. In Times Square, of all places, I took that deep breath, and lived to tell. No bucket list destination could compare.