Everything around me in the hospital was cast in a kind of perpetual, shimmering twilight. Sounds fruity to say that, but it’s true. It would be twilight as I was falling asleep; I’d wake up and it would somehow still be twilight. No matter what time of day it was, the shadows were always long and dramatic in St. Paul’s, the sun outside always seemingly close to going down. I didn’t understand it then, but I was becoming more and more untethered to time. I was leaving behind the things that normally bound me to the world—clocks and calendars and the Internet and so on. I…