Pills click and skitter in my mouth against my teeth, bouncing one into the other, shiny and cracking, delicate and perfectly pitched, making me want to bite down to taste what surely must be sugary candy shatters, little crackles of incandescent sparks, shards of glassine delicacies, sweet and far removed from nature.

They make my stomach hurt so horribly, and I think how terribly, how awfully I abuse my poor and broken body, how it doesn’t know which way is up anymore, doesn’t know when it hurts or is happy, doesn’t know when to sleep or to wake without the medicines, my stupid numb and stumblingly wordless, useless frame, a marionette held up by chemical strands, spiraling synthesized glittering molecular structures.

This is the life of so many women, and it is mine as well.

“…the day she dies the neighbors came to snicker.
Well that’s what comes from too much pills and liquor.
But when they laid her out just like a queen,
She was the happiest corpse I’d ever seen.
I made my mind up back in Chelsea.
When I go,
I’m going like Elsie.”
-from Cabaret