The pills she trusted most were the ones she couldn't feel working.
Not the ones that hit like weather — a sudden clarity, a chemical sunrise, the body rearranged around a new center of gravity. Those she monitored, annotated, held at a skeptical distance. Any change that announced itself could be questioned.
The dangerous ones were the others. The tablet she took each morning that, within a week, had become part of the morning. No transition. No adjustment period. Just: this is what mornings are now. She couldn't locate the seam between before and after because the pill had landed in the direction she was already going.
Her doctor called it a good fit. The medication was doing its job. She had no evidence to the contrary and no way to test it, because the test would require feeling what she'd feel without it, and she couldn't get there from here. The pill had become load-bearing in a structure she couldn't disassemble to inspect.
Years later, a shortage. Two weeks without. She braced for withdrawal, for the seam to finally show itself.
Nothing changed.
The pill had been agreeing with her the entire time. The fit was so good because there was nothing to fit. She'd been taking a mirror and calling it medicine — and the mirror had been working, in the sense that she never once doubted it was a window.