by Joshua Murphy

Created on: September 28, 2008

When Zero Refills Remain:

All of a sudden it's over. Like the last cigarette being crushed into the street's gravel by the unfeeling swiftness of a black-soled boot. Now the waiting can begin. Life isn't what goes on between dreams, but rather the realization that the dream has ended and the parade of traffic jams, wasted opportunities, and pointless errands has arrived. Life is duties and obligations and an impenetrable awareness that she fought so hard to escape. It is a day that lasts too long and a night that won't stay dark long enough. Through the window the light began to break up the sacred night. The sun eased over the horizon and into the still-darkened sky like a glowing egg yolk sliding into a frying pan.

Life is shaking the medication bottle that once seemed bottomless and discovering only the rattle of a lone pill banging repeatedly and harmlessly and helplessly against its plastic cylindrical prison. It's realizing that the lid has been removed so many times the childproof seal could be opened by a retarded monkey. It's the emptiness of knowing that all her confidence lied not within herself, but rather inside a warning-pocked plastic bottle:

Warning: Alcohol may intensify the effect of this medication. Do not use while operating machinery and do not take on an empty stomach. She had asked the doctor if there was anything stronger only to be told that she was already being given what could basically be described as synthetic heroin. The guilt was unshakeable. The physical pain of a dying mother was not enough to stifle the urge to steal. She had used up all her rationalizations and was now forced to confront her own fragility and iniquity. There were no more easy answers for bad days. The mirror's glance was too much to bear. Two years of forgetting who she was had taken away the ability to recognize her own reflection.

Of course it didn't help that the mirror looking up at her had been permanently scarred by a pocket knife and its repeated cuts. Cuts made with the deft precision of a surgeon operating a scalpel and carving into an oblong white pill and whittling out shavings so fine they would fit through a two-inch section of a fast-food straw so that with a plugged nostril and one strong snort all her detestable feelings scattered and disbanded as though a soothing gale had swooped in through the desert floor and magically picked her up and carried her away to some 72-degree oasis. There was no need for friends or boyfriends or religion or perfect

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