Changes I’ve made since learning I have atrial fibrillation, in no order whatsoever, possibly as arrhythmic as my heart: I have read, bought and borrowed books about addressing my anger, some with titles I loathed, others that were quietly surprising and some that were revelatory; downloaded an app to help me meditate which I’d been doing before my diagnosis but now I do more often with intention: meditation, to the sound of a voice that I wanted to dislike but which I’ve grown used to, fond of, the meditation teacher a good balance between goofy and serious; yoga, which I’d tried over the decades at various times, never finishing a series if I bought a pass, always leaving, always feeling like it wasn’t what I needed because I thought I was relaxed enough already, then trying it again, then not liking the studios where the yoga was taught, then trying again when I had a small baby who went to class with me and rolled around the mat then crawled away on the wood floor making it hard to concentrate because corralling her sweet fat baby body took up my attention, and then this year, I tried it again and it stuck, and I credit the safety and security of doing it alone in the comfort of my house, no teacher touching me, just a teacher on a screen smiling and walking me through it all from the countless videos I have access to, videos I can do over and over, and gauge, notice, the efforts my body makes, what comes more naturally, envisioning the next pose, on a schedule of four to six days a week, and I love the word practice, have always loved it; I respond to routine, and when the yoga teacher (the only one whose classes I choose) tells me that a particular pose will open up my heart center, I have to wonder how often my heart center is closed, and also how heart center sounds like a place where people go to receive care for their hearts, to buy new hearts or renew old ones, and I think, my heart center must have a swinging door, though it opens and closes unnaturally, though I’m told it opens when I do some of my favorite poses like trident, which always makes me think of Neptune, or camel pose, where my heart is almost facing the ceiling while I’m on my knees trembling, cobra pose, when my heart is near the ground, facing the floor, in which I’m often coached to ‘float my heart down’, my heart a little buoy in a choppy sea, floating, maintaining . . . so it’s working for me, yoga, finally; quitting alcohol, sort of, because I rarely drink anyway, have rarely drank much in the last few years, beer and wine can sit in my house untouched for months, I give away gifted wine bottles all the time to friends, and this year I can only recall having one fancy cocktail that featured gin on New Year’s Day, ordered to go with a fancy meal in the dark winter of the pandemic, and then maybe I had two pony bottles, are they called pony? Like ‘pony kegs’? those little half bottles of beer, and I drank one while making dinner and instantly felt the buzz, and then I felt a little sadness creep in, and it struck me that I generally avoid drinking in my house because I think it brings up some sort of maudlin despair in me that I don’t need, can’t take—so when I say I quit alcohol, there was barely anything to quit—and when my friend who I’ve drank with most in my life who could drink me under the table, the last time at a bowling alley in Brooklyn in the middle of the night, came to visit on my porch during the week that we first understood the Delta variant was something to have fresh concern about, she brought a bottle of wine and I abstained, so very easily, and I wondered, is this the first time I’ve ever been sober with this friend, like in my whole life knowing her?—she being the one with whom I sat on the floor of the Long Beach Auditorium during a rave in the ‘90s, having eaten Ecstasy together, having decided we would be in touch with each other every week for the rest of our lives—which we did, until the pandemic, or just before—for almost thirty years we maintained that practice, that routine—so when I say I ‘quit’ alcohol, child of alcoholics that I am, there truly was not much to quit; I quit weed, which is a very different matter, a much longer story, but the encapsulated version—the gummie vs. the blunt—is that I’d fallen into daily use sometime, I don’t even want to think back to when, but it solidified after my father died and a whisper started following me everywhere, telling me: You’re allowed to do whatever you want, and another part of me said, Okay, and I did, and a lot of things were quietly ruined since then, and my daily weed use, only after work, a cocktail hour thing, in the backyard where I could hide, stole time and energy and the ability to focus or write, but I felt so good, so relaxed—I believed—until I realized seven years later that in order to make every effort to address my heart condition that was progressing, I had to try quitting weed altogether, and so I set a date, deciding I did not want to be a daily weed user into my forty-eighth year on this planet, and quit the day after I turned forty-eight, but spent the day I turned forty-eight on my front porch with my dear friend, a special friend, a twenty-six-year-old who marched her beautiful self up the path to my house holding a massive bouquet of red roses in her fist, a couple of joints poking out of their dark crimson blooms, and we sat on my porch and smoked one each and talked our faces off, cackling, and I told myself, One day, you’ll be able to do this again, but it will be like this, with a friend, with many open hours, talking, laughing, focused on each other—but that day won’t come again for a while because you have to quit to see how your heart responds, so I quit; I created a relaxation playlist that I listen to when I shower or when I write, occasionally swapping it out for the ecstatic playlist I made for listening to when I write; I quit caffeine, after taking months to go from one full-on large French press full caf to three quarters decaf to zero, to ordering fucking decaf Americanos, and when someone I know said on Twitter that she wouldn’t wish caffeine withdrawal on her worst enemy, I thought, I would, haha, but I didn’t tweet it, and now taking careful sips of cold brew feels like living dangerously, and it makes me sad, but living without caffeine helps; I quit so much salt, having entered the territory of “low sodium,” another effort in changing my internal ecosystem; I have added magnesium because it’s supposed to help heart rhythm, and I have added, temporarily, an adrenal blend, a Chinese herbal preparation by an herbalist, supplements of CoQ10; I have added and deleted turmeric and ginger pills; I have eliminated so much sugar; I exercise more regularly than I ever have in my entire life, riding five to seven miles a day on a stationary bike five to six days a week, preceded by the repetitive lifting of light weights; I follow the moon phases; I pull one tarot card a day and write about its possible meanings; I returned to therapy, in the backyard of my therapist’s house, underneath grape vines lolling on a pergola, amid the sounds of her water fountain, buzzing mosquitoes, and nearby lawn mowers; I use lavender body butter that’s more expensive than any cream I’ve ever bought before; I refocused on the book I’ve been trying to write for the last four years; I have mostly stopped taking the hike I did for over a decade and the few times I go now I move more slowly than I ever have and I go with a friend and we sometimes end at the forest instead of heading up to the peak I loved, where I used to face the sun and say words I learned from a witch, addressing the sun, telling the sun it is the source of all power, asking it to illuminate my heart so that I can do the sun’s work, my skin absorbing the actual rays of the sun as I look over the entire city and sometimes all the way to the beaches west and south of me, all the while visualizing, as I was taught, the rays of the sun penetrating my heart, and then streaming out of it on all sides; I focus on my breath more, realizing how most of my life I have resorted to shallow breathing; I unclench different parts of my body when I notice them clenching, mainly my jaw, my ass; I spend time hiking around the closest park and make notes on what animals I see: hummingbirds, lizards, dogs, butterflies; I take notes on the animals on my neighborhood walks: cats, dogs, green parrots, crows; I focus more on my own two cats, petting and talking to them, laughing at the thought that they have no fucking idea what cats mean to the internet, or that they’re the source of lower blood pressure, stress relief to their humans, how they just roll around looking adorable, paws in the air; I have poured my love into a dog that is traumatized by the life she had before coming into our home; I take my dog outside, avoiding the shit-stained sidewalks; I stopped making to-do lists; I stopped saying the names of people who’ve betrayed me and in some cases, I corrupted their names by adding a lot of extra consonants when I say them, purely for my own amusement; when I have imagined conversations with people I don’t know but for the internet, I remind myself I don’t know them by whispering, Phantom, and when I argue with people in my head that I don’t know but for the internet, I whisper again, Phantom; I have stood in the shower and cried, cried in the passenger seat of the car, laid in bed and cried, let myself cry whenever I’d typically try to hold back the crying; I have casually experimented with the dosage of the medications that are supposed to keep my heart rhythmic and not too fast; I have written the words rhythmic and arrhythmic over and over, and every time I write arrhythmic it is so obvious what it feels like in my body, having that extra two letters ahead of ‘rhythmic,’ rhythmic a word that establishes a rhythm in its sound—while arrhythmic sounds imbalanced to my ear, the front of the word suddenly top-heavy and awkward; I have visualized my heart in a ray of light, or light shooting out from all of its mass while on my bike; I have visualized the heartbeat of my heart and tried or pretended I could synchronize it to a perfect beat; I have envisioned my heart as a cartoon with a face and it reminds me of the Kool-Aid man; I have exercised while visualizing my heart experiencing what we call ‘conditioning’; I have stopped talking to people who only take and take; I have invited, usually before sleep, a dozen antlered deer, a gigantic supernatural black panther, an older woman who resembles me, the sun, and the moon, both with faces, into my psyche to aid me in daily life; I have thought often of my father’s heart; I have dusted my altar, arranged the photos, cleaned the glass and refilled it with water, burned incense, placed flowers, included instant decaf for my grandmother, a Slim Jim for my father, and cellophane-wrapped sweets for my niece and nephew;  I have lit candles, candles that friends have given me, one I bought myself that has taken over a year to melt, pouring out glittered wax, snipping the ends of the wick; I have let myself think more and more about death; I live each day, waiting to see, will it happen today? And how does every decision I make lead me to or away from my pounding heart? The worst are the days when I have done everything in consideration of my heart, all of which are things that also overlap with the care I would take of my metaphorical heart: the lengthy exercise and yoga routines, the meditation, the writing practice, but it arrives anyway, sometimes with the warning of a few hours of slow, out of order thumping, other times just out of nowhere, I’m sitting and my heart takes off, over a hundred beats a minute, before it plunges, then rises, then plunges; meanwhile it forces me to keep making decisions out of consideration for my heart, physical, metaphorical, which of course is a good thing overall but it also makes me miss what I haven’t even wanted lately, or haven’t had in years, things that used to be like, Oh yeah? You have some? I’ll have some, like cocaine, or really, every drug other than weed, because anything out of my ordinary now has the capacity to bring it on, while I live in the constant state of trying-not-to-bring-it-on, to halt it, to head it off at the pass, to detour it, to kill it, but that’s when I’m not trying to reason with it, like when my therapist and I had a talk with it, the afib, and my heart, but in separate rooms, so my heart could tell me what it wants, and then I could talk to the afib separately, after bringing it in from the waiting room, and tell it, Thank you for all you’ve done, thank you for the messages you’ve given me to address other issues I wasn’t taking care of, for the changes I’ve had to make since you’ve arrived, but now, couldn’t you just hang out in the waiting room, could you just maybe chill, somewhere not my body? Can we just let the changes I’ve made do their thing, their magic, on this body now? 

It listens; it nods; it caresses its chin as it looks me in the eye. It reminds me it won’t be the thing that kills me though we both know it can sure as hell lead to the thing that will. We look each other over and all my worst three a.m. thoughts rush in, the ones I have to subdue with rhythmic counting, visions of lying on a still pool of water, the numbers going backwards. I pause and listen: my heart is quiet. It’s doing the thing I remember, the thing it did before all of this started; it’s silently, assuredly, quietly, working.