You know that feeling when the house gets so quiet you can actually hear the walls settling... or maybe it's just your own ears ringing? I think maybe it’s what they call 'somatic preoccupation,' where you just can't stop focusing on a single bodily function... For me, it’s the radial pulse. I sit here in this old armchair—the one with the velvet worn down to the threads because I never could afford the leather one I wanted—and I just press two fingers to my wrist. Every hour. Sometimes more. Is that weird? Do other people count the seconds between the thumps like they’re waiting for a bomb to go off? I don't know if this counts as a confession, really... but I'm afraid of my own skin. I spent forty years painting things no one really wanted to buy. I thought I was being 'authentic,' you know? Choosing the brush over the steady paycheck... but now the attic is full of canvases and the bank account is... well, it’s thin. VERY thin. It’s a strange sort of occupational hazard, I suppose... being a creative person means you spend your whole life looking for patterns, for the rhythm in a composition. But now the only rhythm that matters is this one in my left arm. And when it skips... oh, when it skips... it feels like the whole world just stops for a second. You ever feel that? Like a hiccup in your very existence? Like the record needle just jumped and you’re waiting to see if the song picks back up? They tell you it’s just 'premature ventricular contractions'—see, I looked it up, I like to know the proper names for things—but it doesn't feel like a medical term when you're alone at 2 AM. It feels like a threat. I’m so TIRED, but I’m terrified to close my eyes tonight. What if the next skip is the one where it just... forgets to start again?