For a stretch of time last year, while I was sick, my heart rate stayed high almost constantly—often around 108 beats per minute.
Because the Apple Watch has a high-heart-rate alert, it kept warning me during that period, especially when I was traveling for work. On flights, it would go off because my pulse had stayed at 130 for five straight minutes. But by then I had become so used to that abnormal rhythm that I barely felt anything was wrong.
My heart carried that burden for nearly half a year. After I finally recovered, I was left with a strange illusion: it felt as if my sense of time and space had become unusually sharp. I could look down and focus on something, then estimate almost exactly how many minutes had passed. When a crosswalk countdown started, I could judge the distance at a glance and instinctively calculate the speed I would need to cross just as the last second of yellow expired. Sometimes I could even listen to the drum pattern in a song and roughly tell how many beats landed within a ten-second span.
There was another illusion too. As my heartbeat slowed back down, the changes in time and space somehow felt faster. That feeling of acceleration probably began much earlier, around 2012. Back then I used to joke that maybe the world had actually ended in 2012 after all, and that human society had already been replaced. What we were living in now was just Earth swapped in from a parallel universe; the rules of the wormhole had changed; time was still measured in 24 hours, but its rate had been compressed. Obviously that kind of theory falls apart under scrutiny, but I always found in it a trace of that philosophical flavor sometimes called a devil’s proof.
During my hospital stay, my parents and my wife took turns looking after me. One afternoon, for no clear reason, my heart rate suddenly climbed and the monitor stayed in alarm mode. A nurse told me it was probably a reaction to the IV medication. So all I could do was lie there and listen to that irritating machine keep sounding off, as if announcing that control over my own body had been taken away from me.
I tried to calm myself down. I tried to place all my attention on slow, deep breathing. But the more I tried to control it, the faster my pulse became. It was as if the moment I realized I wanted to seize back control, my body answered with the opposite. Inside that paradox, my heart rate only grew more chaotic.
What happened next was odd. My wife had gone home to pick something up, and when she came back to the room—once no one was paying attention to the alarm anymore—my heart rate dropped back to 108. My father joked, “You relaxed as soon as you saw your wife.” I tested it again, trying to consciously control my pulse, and it immediately edged toward that critical threshold. In the end I had to give up that little power struggle over my own body.
A long time ago I used to hear all kinds of silly theories about heartbeats. You see someone you like and your heart speeds up. Women’s heart rates are a little faster than men’s, so maybe women love a little more. If one person has grown completely cold toward another, then their heartbeat must be flat and calm as well. But if you try to fit my experience into that kind of logic, it turns contradictory very quickly.
Those sentimental theories often sound profound at first glance, like the final paragraph of a melodramatic essay—something designed less to withstand analysis than to make readers pause, nod, and feel understood. The problem is that I used to be exactly the kind of person who loved arguing with those theories.
Some people’s hearts pound harder at the sight of a cockroach than they ever do when they fall for someone.
And then there is the word heartbeat itself, which seems to change meaning as you age.
When you are young, it naturally points to the sweetness and ache of romance. After entering the adult world, there can be a stage when the word becomes almost contagious in a different way—like a stimulant. You hear it and immediately imagine the kind of people shouting onstage that they are definitely going to succeed, all fervor and adrenaline. As if they alone are truly alive, while everyone else is just sleepwalking through life like corpses.
At my age, though, heartbeat means something much plainer: being alive.
There are still things in life that can make my heart race, but now they are concrete things. A spider. Lightning splitting the sky. An elevator malfunctioning while it is moving. Standing at a height. Sitting in a roller coaster car. The symbolic or emotional versions of a racing heartbeat have become rarer. Composure, and the habit of redefining things, have become daily life instead. The older you get, the more realistic the meaning of “heartbeat” becomes—and the crueler. Between life and death, illness and recovery, heartbeat and heart rate turn into numbers. And those numbers have sound: the alarm of the hospital monitor, a sound I can still summon in my head at any time.
For someone who writes, there is still one other way to make the heart race: entering so deeply into a character that the body begins to respond to the events being written. It is not only the heartbeat that changes, but other small physical reactions too.
As age and experience pile up, heart rate loses its romantic definitions and becomes a practical measure. There is something a little regrettable about that. I no longer pay close attention to my heartbeat when something exciting happens. But if I suspect I might have a fever, I will take out my watch and check my pulse. In the past, lying against someone’s chest and listening to their heartbeat felt like a way of guessing what they might be thinking. Now, when I lie on my side and hear the thud of my own pulse rubbing against my ear, it serves mainly as proof that I am still here.
The only recent time I really wanted to see how my heart rate changed was after going on a roller coaster.
Then I discovered that before getting on, you have to take the watch off.
So maybe that is that. If the romance is gone, then it is gone. At this point, even romance itself is no longer the kind of thing that automatically makes the heart race.
Before, a racing heart meant impulse, excitement, the courage to love.
Now, a racing heart means: maybe go see a doctor.