Daniel had lived a happy life for some twenty-odd years when he found out he was dextrocardiac. He entered the hospital for a simple scan, and left it as a changed man. Consequently, he felt like everything he had done up until then had been upside down.
He thought back first and foremost of all the pledges he made to people in the past, always solemnly putting his right hand to his left upper chest. The evening after he got the news, he sat down and devoted himself to making a list of all the promises he ever made, to renew the vows for each one, left-handed and right-chested. But when he pressed himself for examples, none came to mind. He knew he’d made many, but they seemed to have all evaporated from his memory. Even though he did not manage one entry for his list, he did attempt to write the heading but found to his surprise that his ability to write had been severely damaged. The next morning, playing football, he suddenly found himself to be clumsy and powerless on the pitch, and it took him until half-time to figure out his talents had shifted to his left leg. The writing problem turned out to be of a similar kind, and from that day on Daniel was a lefty.
Daniel also recalled, somewhat glumly, all the times he’d said things like “my heart’s not in it”, or “at least my heart is in the right place”. How he crossed his heart and hoped to die when his first girlfriend questioned his devotion towards her. It was a point of pride for him, because he loved her as much as a thirteen-year-old possibly can, but that was all meaningless now. Or it seemed to be, anyway.
But as time passed, Daniel’s initial horror with this inverted world started to abide. Though his moping would suggest all sorts of things, his life on the other side of the Looking Glass had not been much to speak of, so essentially it was a new chance for him, a new foundation to build his house on. He had always been, according to his friends, an extremely rational person, and had been equally revered and detested for this. It was not a lack of empathy that had marred him before, because you can arrive at empathy through step-by-step thinking, but the rather bigger problem of not caring for anything at all. Daniel had once read a quote by Pessoa who felt like his soul was a castle surrounded by a moat, and the drawbridge was permanently raised (or something to that extent). But in this strange mirrorworld Daniel started to feel things he never felt before. He connected to people, wanted to be close to them, wanted to engage, wanted to love and be loved. He stepped out of his castle and got high on the fresh air, high on life.
Once, it must have been about two months after the change, Daniel walked in the park and saw an old couple sitting on a bench. The man was pointing out things in the park. Perhaps he told her how the tracks in the sand of the path spelled out the name of their youngest grandchild, or how every tree (he did a lot of gesturing) reminded him of some beautiful afternoon with her. But most probably he was just pointing out some bird in a tree, or some passerby they both knew. Whatever it was, with every remark his wife moved in closer to him, tugged and held on to his sleeve, smiled and nodded. She smiled with the simplicity of true love. Daniel quickly turned away to a quiet clearing and started crying for hours and hours. When the tears finally stopped coming, he felt immune to gravity, light as a feather. He felt what he immediately recognized as the only bearable lightness of being: the simplicity of happiness.
