How do I console myself when I think I'm dying?

I suppose that, for many, I'm still very young, but, despite my age, I've already suffered several heart scares and have been hospitalized for a wonky heart. I've been on the threshold of a place where you don't know whether you're alive or dead, one step away from saying: so this was it.

At five years old, I notice that my friends are also developing ailments; I envy theirs, for some illnesses are nicer than others. My atrial fibrillation is a pain, to put it bluntly and quickly, because during the attacks, which can last for hours, death can come to me in an instant, with barely enough time to close my eyes. The good thing about the heart is that it doesn't hurt, but it's very frightening. This, paradoxically, and once the anguish has passed, also generates a very pleasant feeling of what they call carpe diem. Since the onset of my arrhythmia, it has been etched in my memory that we're here for two newscasts. That's why I celebrate and gratefully embrace everything that happens to me and I don't worry that the good things aren't eternal, because I understand, even though I don't agree with Paulo Coelho, that nothing is. That's why, when a journalist asks me: David, the difficult thing isn't succeeding, but staying there, doesn't it make you dizzy? I answer, not at all. If my readers disappear overnight, I'll move to a distant country, change my name, and start a different routine and profession. There are endless ways to reinvent oneself.

On days of aggressive tachycardia, I project scenes that connect me with the David of a few years, always happy.

I return to the title of this column. On those occasions when I think I could die at any second, the hug of a friend soothes me, especially if it's a relative or my boyfriend, but it's not enough. However, there is one thing that truly calms me: visualizing my childhood and trying to return to it, to that one time free of sadness. To do this, I trick my mind.

I discovered this trick after moving up to forty times. To help me fall asleep, I would sometimes open my eyes in the darkness of my new bedroom and try to remember the last bed I'd called home to. I sent false information to my brain and managed to trick it into thinking I was in a different room, in a peaceful time of my life. I do something similar when I'm sick.

On days of aggressive tachycardia, I project scenes that connect me with the David of a young age, the one who was always happy not to know he was mortal. I imagine myself lying on the couch in my parents' living room, seven years old, very sleepy, and covered by the tablecloth, watching television before school. I search YouTube for the cartoons I used to watch back then: The Transylvanian Bird Shop. Watching them calms me down. I push the deception a little harder and force myself to think that my mother will be making me peach jam toast in the kitchen every morning—which, by the way, I've never tasted again, because I'm saving that flavor for the regression I'll have to go through one day when my mother is no longer here.

And so, my heart calms down and I fall asleep happily.

Oh, what a life this is!