8 Things To Write About Instead of Ozempic

Written by Kelly Murphy

The sunrise shining on the face of your beloved, drowsily smiling next to you in a too-small bed.

That summer evening you got drunk and forgot your keys to your apartment at that guy from the dive bar’s place and you were too humiliated to call your super so you walked around all night and realized all at once the city wasn’t just an incubator of turmoil-it was your home.

The gnarled and arthritic hands of your grandmother on her deathbed as she stroked your face and told you that you would always be loved, that she would love you even in a Heaven you did not have the heart to tell her you weren’t sure existed.

The day in an otherwise interminably boring college class that you truly knew you had won a point in an argument with an arrogant asshole who believed feminism was a mental condition when in reality his delusional narcissism was the true disorder that needed professional attention.

The look on your mother’s face when you told her that the biggest fear you ever would face in life was becoming exactly like her. Remember her sharp intake of breath, the solar plexus/broken heart bruised gasp she let out, and the storm of sobs that trailed you after you drove away from her home and her life forever.

The first time you kissed someone who truly wanted to kiss you back, the tremble-bellied elation of hot breath and tongue, the sense that you were entering a new country, one where instinct prevailed over intellect, where words could never compare to silken touch.

The endless lonely nights you spent furiously scribbling and typing and writing until your hands and heart ached to vomit out something inside of you that needed to break like a fever, the exhaustion that would follow the purging onto the page, the screen, the fucking walls of that one studio that should have been condemned by inspectors and instead would be haunted by your middling poetics until a fresh coat of paint was slapped over your pain.

The donut you shared with a woman at the homeless shelter where you volunteered that one winter. She said she left that bastard for the last time when he turned the bones in her jaw to mush, and that she didn’t know much but she knew this time in her life was the bad dream she would wake from in due time, that “The good days are just in front of me, I can see ‘em coming.” She ate that donut with gusto, with gratitude. She never once talked about her weight. She had more important things to focus on. She still had her whole life ahead of her.