“A troubled mind,” her friends said. But there were moments when the fish-hook negativity and the bleak, pounding of thought and the hurled stabs of images that came, they, for no apparent reason, stopped.  It wasn't the drugs, because she'd always had these almost transcendent, too temporary, moments of relief, right through her teens, before the days of the drugs.  These were just simply moments when the malicious parts of her own self would cease their grip and leave - not a reversal - but nothing, nothing of thought; just a pure physical sense of the world, of her body within it; of her sentience unbound.
  And so it was now, sitting in the humid coffee shop and facing the window alone at a small table,  just that sort of  moment, with its nurturing calm, with the excoriating thoughts leaving like water running off a hill.  
  She exhaled. The last days had been a helpless, grappling slide into a sucking, jagged, chasm.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, she thought, she could hold on or hold on better.
  People passed outside the window in apparent silence on the crisp, October day.  She watched the trickle-down condensation on the inner glass, smelt the aroma of strong coffee, heard the mummer of customers, the shrieked banter of the young baristas.  At the same time, she thought of his exposed back and its moles, turned away from her in the bed that morning before he awoke, where eventually he'd rolled over to look at her intently, blearily: “You're as white as a church candle,” he'd said.  
  She heard him waken properly in the shower, his washing audibly brisker as the needles of heat broke on his skin.  Then the coarse towelling of his body.
  “I've no clean knickers to put on,” she said, when he returned to the bedroom and began to dress for work. 
  “You'll catch your death for your harlotry!" he replied, jocular, easy. 
  He went to the kitchen.  
  She fell back to the pillow. 
  “I'm off work, today!” she called to the ceiling, above his breakfast clatter. 
  “You told me!” he shouted back.  “Did you … ," he hesitated - " ... forget you told me?”  There was a questioning, a slowed pace to his voice, a creeping worry, that she did not want to acknowledge.
  Rising, her pale, unclothed body did indeed appear luminous, truly almost waxy in the early light.            
  She checked her handbag but had no spare underwear.  Peering into one of his drawers she found boxers, a Christmas novelty pair he wore all the year round.  She reached in and retrieved them, pulled them up her thighs. Now,in the coffee shop, the elastic bit high on her waist and the extra volume of material felt oddly cramped inside her jeans. She looked down to the table before her and her hand, it lifted the coffee cup, travelled as though unlinked to her body upwards to her mouth.  The hot, porcelain lip touched her own thinly fleshed lip and brought instant pain. She thought angrily: How hard is empty? Just how hard is empty?  Then she thought these words again but this time with those hot enemies gathering: tears.