It could wake you up in the middle of the night. Your heart pounding, thudding away in uneven throbs, radiating from the center of your chest. That thing that goes bump in the night. The too long pregnant pause between beats, long enough for your head to become filled with a dizzying fear. You are disconnecting. Then, the two forceful contractions—no space between them as there should be. You know there should be. Your skin feels clammy and your mouth is dry, but you know better than to drink water, even though you keep a mug full of it beside your bed. Recently, noticed that swallowing water makes you feel like you are drowning. When you look over at your bedroom door and see that it is shut, you don’t like that at all. The door is just one more barrier between you and the outside world; one more thing shutting you in if you need to get out. You could get up and open it now, but your legs are too weak, too rubbery, and you figure you would just collapse along the way.

As the irregular convulsions of your heart continue, and all circulation drains from your head, your neck, your mind, you find yourself thinking of the inevitable and wonder how long it will be before somebody discovers you. Your body, that is. Your parents would not notice if you did not call because you do not call regularly. You can’t really risk having friends these days because you figure anyone you would try to hang out with would quickly become frustrated with the frequency with which you suddenly cancel plans, weirded out by the number of times you spontaneously disappear. Ditto significant others. Would your boss really have an ambulance sent to your place if you missed work tomorrow? The day after that? Or would it really not be until the smell permeated the apartment, wafted under the door and out to the lobby of the building. When finally all of the other tenants gang up on you and, after leaving unanswered messages on your voice-mail, got the super or even the cops to bust in and see what sort of animal you have been hiding in there, what trash you’re too cheap or lazy to dispose of. Only it won’t be trash, of course.

How long will it take? How many days before a human body decomposes? If no one knows you are dead until much later, does that mean that you are not really dead? The converse question is if you spend your entire life thinking you are about to die, are you really still alive.

As your vision becomes blurry and a cold, tingling sensation shoots down your left arm, you vow to yourself that if you make it out of this alive, you will do things differently. You will value your life. You will do good things. Build a house for Habitat for Humanity. Volunteer at a homeless shelter. You will give something back. Think positively. Above all, you will never think about death or wish you were dead ever again.

But the truth is, this is just the latest in a string of broken-record promises that you make to yourself every time this happens. Which is becoming oftener and oftener. When you were younger, you told yourself that leaving home would cure these attacks, as though a change in your outer environment could cure the innermost flaws of your psyche. When you were younger still, you welcomed these attacks as the successor of what you considered then to be even worse ones. Later on, you told yourself that once you were finished with the stress of school, they would wear off. You are no longer naïve enough to believe that grad. school will solve all your problems.

You take a multivitamin everyday. You have to restrain yourself from buying the home blood-pressure monitoring kit specially equipped to detect arrhythmias at the pharmacy, mainly because you know the pharmacist will think it is weird that someone under the age of thirty would waste the cost of a bottle of Jack Daniels on an apparatus meant for old people. You drink V-8 even though the taste reminds you of vomit, in order to keep your potassium levels up. Potassium is not found in most multivitamins and a value of less than 3.5 can trigger an irregular heartbeat that could have you dead in minutes. But at the same time, you read that thousands of people die annually of sudden cardiac arrest that occurs for no reason at all.

You think of all those people, how many of them there are, while there’s only one of you. To you, your life seems so much more pronounced and important. You are unique. You will accomplish great things once you apply yourself. But obviously that opinion is very subjective. These other people have hopes and dreams and aspirations equal to or surpassing your own, and they had just as much of a right to be alive as you do. Perhaps even more of one because unlike you they never wished themselves dead.

As you struggle to breathe, you can feel yourself drifting off to sleep. You are always tired these days, but don’t know what that means. Sometimes you try to fight sleep, fearful of unconsciousness, fearful of the unknown that comes with it. It seems preposterous that you ever allowed yourself to sleep all these years. Despite the twinge in the left side of your chest and a buzzing sensation in your head, you know that you will surrender in your battle with slumber.

The next day, you wake up feeling fine, so fine that you doubt any of this even happened. Clearly you hallucinated it. It must have all been in your head. And then, of course, it happens again.

Beth Harrington resides in Massachusetts. Her work has been included publications such as "The Kaleidescope: Emmanuel College Magazine" and "The Fifth Street Review" as well as the print anthology Chemical Lust (Monophonic Press). She won the James T. and Ellen M. Hatfield Memorial Prize for a short story she wrote in college, and upon graduation in December of '07, she will write for rent money.