I'm going to die of heart disease. I would repeat this phrase daily, without object, context or provocation, as if it were an idling tune hummed in protest of looming, dreadful silence. It would come out, jagged and stilted, with a tone of sarcasm and feigned panic, to quell some faint turbulence of the heart, soothing its anxieties with a reminder of the unfaltering certainty of death and disease. Eventually, its worries would cease to exist, it would succumb to whatever decay was planted in it long ago, would finally shed all the rot-blackened layers tying it to its fleshy coil. I'm going to die of heart disease. There it was, abruptly dropped into white noise, a dip in the oscilloscope's staticky streak of near stillness, beckoning for the momentum to stop at a true flat line. I'm going to die of heart disease. Say it again. I'm going to die of heart disease. I'm not sure why I chose heart disease in particular. It seemed an essential bodily failure, the only adequate translation of a general feeling of malaise. The only way to express, casually, almost with humor, that the world had left me reeling at the thought of leaving my dim room.