The body remembers. It holds moments and feelings like nutrients, pouring itself repeatedly into eerily familiar molds. The touch of a lover. The ache of an old scar. The first rush of the high. The body remembers.

Stephanie is reaching into her pocket, crooking her finger around her hipbone to dig into the softened folds. She is thinking about her father -- something she hasn't done in a long time. When dad was my age, she reflects, I was already on the way. She lays a hand on her sunken belly and tries to picture a happy roundness, the skin stretched over to protect her baby from the world.

Stephanie is 23 years old, and nowhere near ready to have a baby.

Still digging in her pocket, her fingers brush plastic, pinch at the tiny bag and deftly tuck it into her palm. She pushes her way into the bathroom stall and shuts the door behind her.

Muscles will maintain their shape from exercises. Creases will form where the brow has furrowed. Calluses will form on elbows, toes, palms. The body is a roadmap of things past.

She is crouched against the wall of the stall, knee propped up against the john. She has laid out everything she needs on the back of the toilet. Spoon, rubber hose, lighter. Her breath is heavy with concentration ( focus! her mind screams), and she is beginning to sweat.

Stephanie goes to the needle exchange regularly. She doesn't share needles. She knows all about the diseases -- has seen first-hand what they do. So she's safe. She's aware of the irony, using clean needles to poison her blood, and wears it like a mantra: I'm too educated to be dumb; too strung out to be smart.

The music from the club is rattling the lock of the stall with every beat, and Stephanie's eyes flicker back to make sure it remains locked. The walls of the stall are covered in graffiti, mostly the names of bands or boyfriends long forgotten by now. Someone has written over a particularly dense section, in gold marker. Lesbians rule! We are the future, it says .

The body keeps a record of experience. Bones get broken and heal, but they leave behind an ache that never fully goes away. The record is not only physical. The body catalogues the flutters and flips of romance, the tingles of lust, the rushes of rage. Emotions stored as physiological responses.

Everyone thought it was cool that her dad was gay. People used to talk about his "life partner" with a reverence that made Stephanie snort. It was the late '80s and enlightened people were supposed to be open-minded about homosexuality. Mostly, Stephanie thought they brandished her dad like some kind of shiny new accessory (Oh, this? It's my gay friend. Doesn't he just go perfectly with my outfit?) . They all wanted to be part of the club for a couple years, until the exotic new friends started to get sick, and everyone scattered to the four winds. Having a gay friend was fun, but the "gay disease" was not.

And so, Stephanie watched her friends' parents pause awkwardly at her door. Not that anyone was sick in her house, but, you know, it might be lingering in the air . Meanwhile, she was accompanying her dad and John on regular hospital visits to sick friends (her many uncles) and, later, to the funerals.

The body remembers more than the mind. It knows the sensations of our birth, reminds us of the tightness as we pushed our way into freedom. The body remembers what we were before we were born -- the nothingness before the embryo started to divide our cells. The quiet and calm. The body seeks to take us back there.

Stephanie has one foot on the toilet seat, and is propping her elbow on her knee to steady herself. Such a fucking cliché , she thinks as she works the wheel of her lighter, standing in a cramped bathroom stall just to get high . Her hand is shaking, and it takes a few tries to get a flame. She lifts the spoon and wills the powder to cook faster, watching it bubble and dissolve. It reminds her of the way her father would caramelize sugar to pour over her traditional birthday crème caramel. She can almost smell the sticky burnt sweetness as she reaches for the hose.

Her arms are criss-crossed with marks -- some from needles, some from knives. Her veins have pushed their way to the very outline of her angular arm. They push at the thin layer of skin, thirsty and threatening to burst out. Nowadays, the hardest part of this ritual is finding a spot on her arm that hasn't already been pierced and scarred over from the needle.

As sensations are repeated, they are blurred and softened. The first lover's hand on our waist is infinitely stronger than the tenth. We are forever attempting to recreate that initial feeling, that first intensity. But we are never successful. And so it is with the body. What is sleep but the body remembering that time before birth? Junkies for the pre-birth calm, our bodies attempt every night to recreate it.

Stephanie's dad was as good as he could be. Her mother had died of an unexpected aneurism, and left him alone with a three-year-old daughter. He wasn't even 30, and found himself aching to understand what this tiny girl was going to need from him. He read books on parenting and books on issues affecting young girls. He learned to cook and met with Stephanie's preschool teachers. He asked all of his female friends about their menstrual cycles. He wanted to be ready.

When John entered their lives, both Stephanie and her father were happy about it. He was handsome, nice to Stephanie and enthusiastic about their little family. It was clear to Stephanie that her dad was wildly in love with John, and she found herself missing his attention. It wasn't until she was older that she realized she could get attention from John, too. And, she reflected, he certainly didn't seem gay around her.

The needle rolls under the stall door, a single drop of blood shining at its end.

The warmth begins in her belly, courses into her toes, fingertips and the space behind her eyelids. Her head arches back, the wave of her high cresting in her forehead like the peak of an orgasm. She smells honeysuckle -- briefly -- then chocolate. Her body begins to float, feeling infinitely heavy and light all at once. The empty baggie, floating in the toilet, turns and winks at her, then dives like a fish into the bottom of the toilet. Her skin is cracking, splitting like dry earth along the lines of her scars; the veins are breaking through the skin, waving like tendrils over her head Lesbians rule! She is swimming in the air, gazing down at her feet sinking into the floor She can feel the fetus in her belly, cells splitting, limbs forming, a baby within a baby Her body is floating away, floating back back back into the quiet and calm before her birth. Remembering.

Stephanie slides slowly down the wall of the stall until she is curled up beside the toilet. She rests her cheek against the cool of the toilet basin, and closes her eyes to sleep.