Just this one breath, just this one exhale

I was looking back over Lidless and I was rereading the parts where Rhriannon says, "Just this one breath, just this one exhale, just this one breath, just this one exhale... I want this, I love this, I'm happy." It is the very first lines of the play and the very last lines she says before she dies. In the beginning we are not just what we mean and where they come from. Later on in the play, we find out that Bashir teaches Rhiannon to tell this to herself when she is dealing with her asthma, the suffocating disease that ended her life. I think there could be an interesting correlation made here between Bashir and Rhiannon. We know that Rhiannon is the product of her mother's decision to rape her detainee at Gitmo. Bashir plausibly could have gone through other types of torture at Gitmo such as waterboarding. I say this because of the reference to the sound of ocean waves in the very beginning of the play after Rhiannon's line, "Just this one breath, just this one exhale..." Bashir could have told himself, "I want this, I love this, I 'm happy" as was being tortured, or water boarded, to physically make it through. I would argue that it saved him physically, but killed him mentally. (When his daughter comes to visit him, he told her that she had lost her dad back at Gitmo.) Bashir then passes his technique onto Rhiannon when he learns of her asthma. At the end of the play Rhiannon doesn't die mentally, but physically. Just as Bashir died mentally from torture at Gitmo, Rhiannon died physically from the torture of asthma.

Just food for thought and potential discussion. Let me know if I am way out there with this...