infertility.

She ate oranges with the peels still on. It felt rebellious and tough, and she knew it was good for her. She figured it into her health karma count- it counteracted the cigarette she indulged herself in each month.

(Even though the taste made her cry. Even though the process of lighting it haunted her. Even though she despised the memories that flew out of it in gasping ringlets.)

The blackened ceilings in her childhood home, holding her mothers shaking hand as the cancer devoured herfragile lungs. But she couldn't help it. It was an addiction, but not to the smoke. To the luxury, to the glamour she felt when she held that trash between her fingers, lifted it between her lips.

She felt like a trashy bohemian  poet, the kind of girl who would try to sleep with Kerouac and Ginsberg. She would fix herself black coffee, poured in a stained, chipped mug, and balance a blank notebook on her lap, a pen held delicately in her right hand, waiting for the words to come. As the bitter taste collected in fuzz on her tongue, she waited for the words.

They never would come.

Then she would become frusterated, angry, furious. She would lick her lips and tug on her earlobe, she would wring her bony fingers until her fingernails were white. She would stop her feet and talk to herself, trying desperately to birth some revelation on the human condition.

The only passion she felt came from the lack of life in her.

She wanted stories to come, she wanted words and thoughts and life to just spill out of her.  But as she neared the end of the cigarette, all she ever got was hacking, a cough that echoed her mother's last sounds. A cough that haunted her, that made her crush the ash onto her notebook, burning a hole in it.  She would down the little coffee that was left, and be jittery when she stood.

Then she'd go inside, grab a few sleeping pills,

and get the best night's sleep of the month.