This is just something I've been working on for the past two days. First time in a while that I've been able to put together a new work of fiction. Hope you enjoy:
It was pills that eventually did her in.
We met in September, freshmen in college, and by May she was practically dead. I still remember the first time we met: I felt a magnetism to her, a compelling attraction. One thing I will always remember about her is her shyness, like that of the sun during a thunderstorm, never peeking out from behind dense clouds. The shyness was to such an extent that she rarely looked people in the eye; but when she did, you remembered it. She loved to dance: that was when her shyness dissolved and the sun came out. But as the year went on, she danced less and less.
It’s my theory that she began taking Vicodin because she saw it as a way for her to break out of her shell, to become a different person. She spoke often to me (for those few months we were together) about feeling alienated from the people we hung out with. So perhaps for her Vicodin was a way to forget her old shyness, and as an over-the-counter reinvention. Once, she told me the prescription pills made her feel like Marilyn Monroe. She meant it in a glamorous sense. I don’t think she understood the tragic irony in her own statement.
It’s hard for me to tell when she started taking the pills. We never directly spoke about it. I remember, early in our relationship, her talking about an injury she had in her senior year of high school. That was, she said, when she got her first taste of the medication. She also mentioned that her family would keep excess pills (unfinished prescriptions from other family members’ injuries) in the medicine cabinet. I imagine that sustained her until she moved to the big city for college, where a girl with money and motive can have anything she wants, Vicodin included.
She never took pills in front of me, but I knew when it happened. Aside from the prescription bottles in her room, there were the days when she would complain about stress, anxiety, and the like. That meant Vicodin would follow as soon as she found a moment alone. I sometimes imagine that scene: her in a darkened college dorm room, the roommates gone for a moment. She slips into the bathroom, quietly locking the door behind her, and looks at herself in the mirror stapled to the wall. She stares at her long red hair and thin lips. She looks herself in the eye for a minute--I don’t think she looked herself in the eye very much either--and those thin lips begin to quiver. She takes one, two, three Vicodin; however many it takes. And before her eyes, she sees Marilyn Monroe in the mirror.
Over the course of months, she took pills more and more as the dependency increased. They became a daily meal for her; and her old personality, the person I met in September, was left a crumpled heap on her bathroom floor. She began to change. Her voice became airy, and while she was thin to begin with, she became sickly skinny.
And we came to that night in January, when I decided it was over. We were at a bar when I told her. I didn’t want it to be like this, I said, but you’re not the same person I used to know. Admittedly, I was still holding out a vague hope that my words might cause some kind of sudden change in her, a last-second transformation. As if I had that power. But my words were like a whisper in a windstorm, they seemed to go unheard; or at least, they caused no reaction in her. Unchanged, she slipped off the barstool and walked past me, over to the bar’s dance floor. Pulling on my coat, I watched her dance for a moment before I left the bar for the cold streets. Her dancing was awkward, slow, and inhuman. But I’m sure that in her mind, she was Marilyn Monroe.
I still see her from time to time, in passing. We talk like mere acquaintances now, if we talk at all. But whenever I see her, her eyelids hang lower and lower on her eyes; soon, I fear, they will close for good on her final act.
It was pills that eventually did her in. And while she is still living, she is most certainly no longer alive.
