Birthday Suffocations

Usually, getting choked out on your birthday is a fun event. A bit of trust placed in the strong hands of the mechanic you were dating at that time. His hands wrapped around your throat were strong enough to remove lug nuts without a torch wrench, but he had learned how to tune that strength into a sort of gentle and temporary asphyxiation.

But, this is a story about a different sort of birthday suffocation. 

You've never done love less than full throttle, and when you dated this previously mentioned mechanic, you were peddle to the fucking metal. You got lost in his brown eyes, insane work ethic, double dimples and Jeffrey Dean Morgan swagger. 

When his 30th birthday was coming up, you wanted to make sure he was taken care of, so you took the day off work and went to work decorating his workshop and office, and gathered up the food and drinks he liked best. It was the middle of winter in Ohio, and the snow was a half a foot thick on the ground, so you kept yourself tucked away in the office with the door shut tight and the heater on full blast.

Hours went by, all by yourself. Once you had finished the party setup, you spent a few hours studying, attempting to finish yet another college degree you didn't need. Your head began to throb and sort of dizziness gripped you, but you figured it was dehydration and stress, so you chugged down bottled waters until you had to pee every 30 minutes.

Still, the headache persisted.

The first guests showed up, and you filled them in on the details, that the mechanic wouldn't arrive for another hour at the soonest. So you all cozied yourself up into the warmth of the office with the heater still running full blast.

The other guests started to get headaches too, and yours had become so terrible you thought that perhaps you must have hit your head at some point when you were in a fury and decorating, and just forgot you had bumped it.

Your boyfriend showed up, and everyone yelled surprise, and the widest smile you'd ever seen, paired with his tiger trap dimples made the headache worth it.

He sat and ate and drank and bullshitted, and eventually, he said he had a headache too, which was unusual because he never got headaches. You slumped over the arm of the couch, your headache so strong, you began to see white spots and your breathing became labored.

His dad was the last to show up, and immediately went to the restroom, and upon leaving the restroom suddenly yelled, 

"EVERYONE OUT OF THE OFFICE NOW!"

The father's raised voice wasn't unusual, for he was an alcoholic with an anger issue and it was his property, so everyone quickly got up and headed outside. You were almost unable to walk straight, but you made it out and fell into the snow, and planted your head into a drift.

Minutes later, the dad reappeared after storming around the back of the building. 

His face red and spit flying from his mouth, the dad yelled at his son in front of everyone.

"You motherfucker, the out vent for the HVAC is blocked with fucking snow. The Carbon Monoxide detector in the bathroom was throwing an error code. You all could have died!" his dad yelled.

Its unclear where you went to, but you drifted in and out of consciousness for a few hours, unsure if you were living or dying, or riding a line between the two. Maybe it was the sudden rush of oxygen after being deprived of it for so long, but the next day your head somehow hurt even worse than when you were being asphyxiated. 

 If there is ever a moral to the story of your life, its that near-death-experiences are a dime a dozen when you don't quite understand what death is supposed to feel like.