I’m learning about the family; my grandmother’s sister, Anne died young from a weak heart. The nurses take my vitals twice. 96/70. I heard animals sense those who are ill and protect. Is this why Dash wouldn’t leave my bedside at my brother’s home with his wife and their baby. I am the most endangered, at the mercy of my heart. In middle school, every girl wanted to have VF, for the health teacher to have to check our wrist, neck, feet to find a pulse. You sleep so silently, I thought you were dead, my boyfriend said in a tone of actuality. I refuse to see a cardiologist for now. I did a rotation as a medical scribe; I couldn’t tell if the people were dying of loneliness or waiting to die; we talked over them, we talked about them, we talked about them as if they were only the paper with ink we’d written.