This morning I woke up at five for my sadly only one hour-long writing session before I head to work. Even such a short session can make me feel like the day was worth it, in case I’m too mentally exhausted to produce anything of value in the afternoon. Throughout that hour, though, my heart kept leaping strangely, which seemed to change depending on whether I leaned back on the chair or not. I felt a bubbling of some kind going up my torso. My mind seemed off, although that happens semi-randomly, so I didn’t think much of it.

A couple of hours later, at work, the weird leaping in my heart returned. I performed an electrocardiogram through my portable device, and it confirmed I was arrhythmic. That explained my woozy state. My brain felt off, and I had trouble thinking. Some coworker, unaware of my plight, mentioned that today was St. Valentine’s Day. How fitting.

Anyway, as I headed to the ER, my heart reverted spontaneously to sinus rhythm. The triage doctor told me that other than confirming that I wasn’t arrhythmic anymore, the was no point in doing anything (even referring me to a cardiologist, because my assigned one is aware of my heart issues), so I returned to work as if the organ that needs to beat about sixty times a minute wasn’t faulty. And it’s no longer reliable thanks to an experimental RNA-based treatment supposedly developed to counter a virus manufactured in Wuhan, China partly through money siphoned from US taxpayers. This whole world needs to be bulldozed through.

Anyway, right now I’m not in the mood to do anything. I’m hoping the morning passes quickly and soon enough I find myself back at home, where I’ll be able to disappear into my writing. In the meantime, during my bus and train rides or as I walk the streets, I’ll lose myself in daydreams of going back in time to 1972 and showing up in a patient room at the Stella Maris sanatorium to convince a certain blonde, blue-eyed genius that killing herself is a terrible idea. I keep rewriting that scene in my head as if I was tasked by my subconscious to nail it. Maladaptive daydreaming I suppose they call it. But when life itself feels like a bad dream, escaping into writing or daydreaming is a survival mechanism.